Deus ex Machina
by ZephyrHawk
Summary: The rift between worlds is opening, and Rose and the Doctor will do everything in their power to keep it closed. Reunionfic. Torchwood xover.
1. Prologue

_**Copyright Notice:**__ As an attorney, I advise you that I'm totally not worth the money you'd spend to file a complaint against me._

_**Author's Note:**__ This story was originally conceived shortly after the end of Season Two of Doctor Who. At the time, I thought to myself, "What would it take to get Rose and the Doctor back together again?" To which the obvious answer is- _deus ex machina_. Immediately, I realized what perfect title that would be for a Doctor Who related fanfiction (in fact, I am continually surprised that everyone doesn't name their Whofic thusly). The point being, I am fully aware that events are likely to occur in the currently pending 4__th__ Season of Doctor Who, and the 2__nd__ Season of Torchwood (which I have yet to complete my viewing of) which will render much of my plot moot. However, I have tried to stay as true as possible to the two series as I know them. My one concession to discontinuity would be the fact that I decided to keep the name 'Torchwood' for the corresponding alternate universe agency. Because really, it's quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that Pete's World (lacking a both a Doctor and a _Tooth and Claw _event) would come up with the same name. However, I got tired of the characters having to explain the novel acronym I originally developed every few pages. Plus, this was funnier. In other words, if potentially AU situations bother you, feel free to spend your time elsewhere._

_**Musical Accompaniment:**__ "Through the Fire and Flames"- Dragonforce (try it, it's got the sexiest bridge ever); honorable mention to "The Next Time I Fall In Love"- Peter Cetera and Amy Grant._

**Deus ex Machina**

It is an old Earth adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. This is a prime example of how old adages, Earthling and otherwise, are basically just a load of meaningless bullshit wrapped cleverly around a teeny, tiny kernel of truth. Absence most assuredly does _not_ make the heart grow fonder. Quite the opposite, really, as absence tends to make one forget all the amusing little quirks and traits of a person that are what engenders endearment in the first place. Which is not to say, of course, that one's heart cannot hypothetically grow fonder. Of course it can. It is a natural progression, in social beings, to go from introduction, to acquaintance, to the admiration generally reserved for friendship, to true caring, to emotional bonding, and so forth, ultimately culminating in a cosmic oneness that no one in my not inconsiderable experience has ever actually achieved, but which enough races across the universe seem to firmly believe in to make any logical skeptic doubt the complete veracity of his calculations.

Not that I ever doubt the veracity of my calculations, but I'm getting off point.

What the point is, is that a lack of proximity to someone you care about doesn't make you care for them any more. However, as previously noted, there is a pebble of truth buried within this shiny, pearlescent platitude. That pebble being, of course, that when said departed person returns to proximity, one often comes to the sudden and violent realization of how much one cared about them before they left. It is this surge of returning emotion, in comparison with the veritable wasteland that existed during the individual's absence, which makes one feel almost as if their relative fondness for a missing person has grown threefold during the intermission (very Grinch-like actually- that is if one subscribes to the belief that the Grinch never really had a heart two sizes to small to begin with, which I do believe was the author's intention all along, though mind, I've never actually taken the time out to ask him, sorry digressing again). So to put it metaphorically, for humans do so seem to enjoy metaphor (I mean, really, take for example that Seuss character), if you take away a single candle from a room where someone's trying to read, the lack of extra light will annoy them at first, but then they'll adjust to their new surroundings, bury themselves in their story, and move on with their lives. But, and here's the kicker, bring the candle back and bam! Suddenly, everything's bright again! The room takes on a whole other character, the shadows are less daunting, and you can enjoy your Jane Austen in peace (or Seuss, or Rowling, or what have you). It's not that the room is any brighter than it was at the beginning, you see, it's just a matter of comparison.

And so, the only reason to invent this silly notion of absence making the heart become, well, more fond, is to give comfort to people when their loved ones are away. To make them think that maybe there's a point to it all; that maybe, just maybe, when their beloved returns, things will be okay then. Forget okay, better, even, than they were before. And maybe, then, they'll be happy (retrospectively, of course) that they endured this time of absence, because it made them so much happier (and so much more in love with the absent person) in the end. It's a foolish idea created by foolish individuals of an even more foolish species who, luckily for them, are easily fooled by such a myth.

The truth is that there's absolutely nothing good about being separated from the one you love. Not a damn thing.


	2. Chapter 1

"Well now," the Doctor stated, from his position half slumped over the controls of the TARDIS, "That went well."

Martha and Donna, both clinging to the safety railing surrounding the entranceway, took a moment to give each other a half shocked 'Is he for real?' look before responding.

"Sure," Martha said, returning her attention to the Time Lord, "If you ignore the angry armed locals…"

"And the running for our lives…" Donna added, a tad breathlessly.

"Through a swamp."

"At night."

"In a thunderstorm," they finished together, their voices rising to near shouting. The two women stared angrily back at their traveling companion, shivering in their soaked and muddy apparel. Quailing slightly under the combined weight of their gazes, the Doctor continued temporizing.

"Nonsense. Matters were considerably more pleasant than they could have been. For instance, we were only chased away with pitchforks and torches. As if those could do any lasting damage." Heartened by this comparison, the Doctor smiled widely and went on. "Now just think if it had been a post-industrial society. Then we might have been in a spot of bother."

Martha's mouth hung open, as she wavered between incredulity and barely controlled fury. She had been poked with a pitchfork, threatened with burning at the stake, suffered some pretty severe rope burns from her lashings, and, in a final indignity, lost a trainer to the muck of the swamp the Doctor had so conveniently decided to land the TARDIS in the midst of. She was done in and just did not have the energy to have it out with anyone, let alone with a half crazy alien time traveler who had managed to almost get them killed…again. "Never mind," she said shaking her head in defeat. "I'm going to get cleaned up and head to bed."

"Yeah," said Donna, twisting the dampness out of her thick red hair. "Think I'll join you."

"Now really ladies," the Doctor chided, raising his eyebrows suggestively, "Let's try to keep the TARDIS fraternization to a minimum." Donna snorted, but Martha was in no mood to be joked with.

"Whatever," she mumbled, knowing that she sounded like a petulant teenager, and not caring. Stalking off towards her rooms as best she could in one shoe, Martha made a point of leveling a not-so-friendly look at the still grinning Doctor. Donna hurried to catch up, glancing behind herself with concern as she exited the control room.

"Really," Martha continued in an annoyed tone, limping as quickly as she could down the corridor to where her room was located (or where it had been located earlier that day, one could never really be sure that the room would stay there all that long). "The nerve of that man. As if running for our lives through a bog with ergot crazed villagers chasing after us was a privilege." Martha turned sharply down a side corridor she was not at all sure had been there that morning. "Let's go to Salem, he says…it'll be educational, he says…bloody hell, I'd rather be back in 1913." With an angry grunt Martha stopped her tirade and glanced at the walls of the TARDIS curving around her.

She had absolutely no idea where she was.

"Ummm," said Donna, hurrying up beside her and glancing concernedly up and down the corridors. "I think it's this way," she pointed, and headed off in what passed for an authoritative manner. Having no better alternative, Martha followed, leaving a single set of damp sock-prints in her wake. Eventually, the two stumbled upon a section of hallway which looked slightly more familiar than the rest, and Martha cried out triumphantly as she spied the bright orange necktie she had tied about her door handle, to aid herself in situations just like this one.

"Right," she said, yanking the door to her bedroom open perhaps a little more violently than was necessary. "A shower, then bed, then coffee tomorrow morning, _then_ maybe we'll see if I'm willing to listen to that alien's explanations of why he thought this would make a nice holiday." Martha sighed heavily, then looked over her shoulder at her companion. Donna was standing with her own door ajar, across the hall from Martha's room. "Same for you?" Martha asked.

"Yeah," Donna replied, with a touch of annoyance in her voice, "I'll be sore tomorrow, that's for sure. Best get some hot water and rest while I can." Smiling ruefully, Martha said goodnight to her friend and slipped through to her bedroom.

Donna stood for a moment, poised on the threshold of her own room. There used to be just a blank wall opposite her door, until Martha had come back on board. Then to their surprise and the Doctor's unending amusement, Martha had discovered that her own room was suddenly located directly across from the redhead's. Normally, Donna thought it was good to have a friend so close by. She never had to go wandering the corridors in bare feet and jim-jams whenever she wanted some late night girl talk. Well, they said it was late night, but then day and night didn't have much meaning on the TARDIS; besides that which its two resident humans ascribed to it. However, being so close to Martha did have its drawbacks. First and foremost, it tended to be hard to sneak off and have one-on-one "guy friend" talk at any time of day or night without alerting Martha's sharp senses. It was for this purpose that Donna remained silently half inside her doorway, waiting for the soft squealing of pipes that would indicate Martha had indeed ensconced herself in her private shower stall.

As soon as she was sure her irate companion wouldn't be following, she tiptoed back in the direction of the control room. Martha was a great girl. Independent, smart, pretty. Donna, who had gone from one dead end cubicle job to another for most of her life was always amazed, and a little envious, of the young doctor's talents and abilities. She was kind and attentive, and on any other day - when she hadn't been tested to her limits by buckle-shoed religious zealots - she likely would have noticed herself the Doctor's dangerous change in expression at her words and actions. But if Martha had one failing, it was her temper; and when she was in a temper there wasn't much that was going to change her view.

Donna, however, had noticed.

She'd been noticing it a lot recently. That look. Where his eyes went from brown to black, and it wasn't a trick of the light. The one that looked like death; both as an experience and a promise. The one he had been wearing when they first met.

At present, he was casting the "Look" at the TARDIS console. He stood with his arms crossed and his head slightly bowed, staring at the various knobs and levers, the majority of which Donna was fairly certain had absolutely no purpose, as if he didn't even see them; as if he was looking past them into the depths of the time vortex they concealed. Donna took a deep breath, ambled into the control room and leaned against a support arch. The Doctor's head snapped up at the soft sound of her approach. A wide grin cracked his face and suffused it with an amusement Donna might even have believed, if she hadn't just been watching him covertly from the passageway and seen the Look.

"Hello then," he said cheerfully, leaning back against the console. "Change your mind?"

"Yeah," Donna said. "Think I'm too worked up after all that running. Thought maybe I'd have a cup of tea before heading off to bed." Donna hadn't used to be good at lying, but hanging around with a manipulative alien genius who made a game out of trying to fool every official on every planet in the known universe, you couldn't quite help but pick up a trick or two. "You want a cup?" she asked innocently.

"Love some," he replied, and Donna watched as the smile softened just a bit. Becoming, if not more real, at least, a little less forced.

When she came back with the tea a little while later, balancing the two nearly full cups precariously upon their fine china saucers, the Doctor had already immersed himself in the workings of the TARDIS. Donna set her own cup gently down on the console and walked over to where his two long legs extended from beneath the paneling.

"Doctor?"

"Hmmm…." he replied, slightly muffled. Donna could all but see the sonic screwdriver clenched between his teeth.

"Tea?" she continued.

"Oh," he said, pushing himself out from under the TARDIS' central column. "Right. Almost forgot." He smiled up at her and reached for the cup. Picking up her own drink, Donna walked over to the lone chair and flopped down on its battered cushions. The Doctor perched on the console and, though he held the cup thoughtfully in his hands, he didn't drink. The control room was uncomfortably silent for several moments as Donna waited for the Doctor to gather his thoughts. Her eyes drifted about the soft orange-ish interior of the TARDIS.

'Orange,' she thought, not for the first time. 'Why orange? Not too fond of orange. It's only slightly better than indigo on the color scale, and that's only because who the heck even knows what 'indigo' is. There's nothing that rhymes with it, you know, orange. Well, not in English any-'

"Roller skates," the Doctor said abruptly, breaking her out of her reverie.

"What?"

"The Pan-Valatians would have liked roller skates." The Doctor went on, completely ignoring the fact that his conversation had initiated entirely within the confines of his own consciousness and that Donna was now left to pick up the pieces of what amounted to a very one sided argument.

"The Pana-whatsit?" she asked.

"Pan-Valatians," explained the Doctor, finally sipping at his tea. "They live on a planet which had a highly volcanic past, the surface of which is almost entirely covered in swathes of smooth black lava rock."

"Oh," said Donna, somewhat dubiously.

"Ummm, yes," the Doctor sucked in his breath and went on. "Mind you, they didn't evolve there. They were originally from Valatia, a highly commercial planet, and they emigrated to Pan-Valatia for mining and trade purposes. Good fertilizer in lava rock."

"Undoubtedly." The Doctor looked at Donna, clearly trying to see if she was having a laugh at his expense. "Go on," she encouraged, smiling broadly and attempting to appear fascinated, "About the roller skates." The Doctor smiled at her eagerness, a real smile that drowned some of the darkness in his eyes with liquid brown.

"Well, you see," he said enthusiastically, setting his teacup down on the console and clapping his hands together, "The Pan-Valatians always had a terrible time getting around on the surface of their new home. They had very soft foot pads and-"

Donna did her best to look interested as the Doctor enthused about the wonders of the Pan-Valatian race and the miraculous ingenuity of humans, striding from one end of the console to the other with great expository sweeps of his arms, talking at 100-klicks a minute. She didn't have to fake the smile, though, as she watched the Doctor's cares slip from him like clouds passing over the moon. The Look was gone, and Donna had done her job, again.


	3. Chapter 2

"So, wait," Owen began, "You know this _Doctor_." He hadn't gone quite so far as to make insulting little finger quotes in the air around the term, but Jack could hear them anyway in his skeptical intonation.

"Yeeessss," he said, drawing the word out and giving Owen a scathing look, meeting the young doctor's thinly veiled insolence with some his own. "Point of fact," he went on more cheerfully, "We're quite intimate."

"How intimate?" asked Gwen, her tone signifying in equal parts her disbelief and her disapproval of anyone who had ever been "intimate" with Jack.

"Not like that," he replied with exasperation. Then, reflecting on the situation, "Not that I would have minded."

Ianto cleared his throat loudly and Tosh moved the conversation along. "Exactly how do you know him?"

"Well, we've traveled together," Jack explained, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

"Traveled?" Gwen still sounded incredulous. "Like what, you've backpacked across the continent together, then? Hitched your way between hostels."

"In a manner of speaking," Jack continued evasively. "Except, replace Europe with all of space and time."

"Riiiiight," was Owen's only comment.

"I'm serious," Jack went on, a little put out that his team didn't appear to believe him. Hadn't he showed them time and again that he had an extensive knowledge of the universe. Weren't they, by now, used to weirdness of every shape and color. Wasn't he Mr. Unkillable? "I've been around the universe in his time machine…seen the end of the universe, in fact….not too pleasant, I'll tell you."

"How," asked Tosh, clearly attempting to piece things together, "Can you travel around the universe in a time machine? Wouldn't it just go back and forth through time or something?"

"Errr…" Jack crossed his arms, buying time as he attempted to come up with a simple explanation his team could comprehend, and believe. "Well, it's not _just_ a time machine. It's a spaceship too. And it can teleport. And…" Jack paused in the act of explaining how it was bigger on the inside and, seeing the blank stares his team was collectively leveling at him, tried a strong finish. "It's a TARDIS!" Jack threw his arms out as if that should explain everything and he clearly had nothing more to say. Gwen, Tosh, and Owen exchanged glances. Ianto buried an irrepressible grin in his tea mug.

Jack sighed heavily. "Fine. What would it take for you to believe me?"

After a short pause, Gwen broke in, "Start from the beginning." Jack looked at her uncomprehending. "Where did you and this…Doctor…meet?"

Jack leaned back against the edge of his desk and gave a half smile at the memory. "In London during the Blitz," he said. Then amended, "My first time through."

"The Blitz? You mean like in the forties?" queried Tosh, and upon Jack's silent nod continued thoughtfully. "I guess that makes sense…sort of…but just what exactly was a universe traveling, time hopping, alleged super alien doing in 1940's London?" Jack opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again. Then, before he could take on any more resemblance to a fish, decided to tell the truth…to a certain extent anyways.

"He was looking for me."

Another less than covert glance passed between several members of his team. Ianto had given up on the conversation entirely and, instead, had engrossed himself in staring at the tile patterns of the floor.

"Look it's not important why he was there, or why I was there for that matter," he said, cutting off Gwen with a quick motion of his hand before she could ask her inevitable question. "What matters is that we ran into each other, he invited me on the TARDIS and we traveled for a while becoming fairly close friends, saving the world numerous times, and ultimately spending a year of torture and imprisonment under the dictatorial rule of a power crazed alleged super alien who took over the earth a few months back."

Ianto looked up from his study of the floor, the faces of everyone in the room went very carefully blank, and Tosh, almost imperceptibly, glanced towards the decanter on Jack's desk as if to check whether the relative level of its contents had been significantly lowered recently.

"Which of course," Jack sighed, hanging his head in defeat, "You wouldn't remember at all." The room was completely silent after Jack's crazy admission, and the soft ticking of the wall clock could be heard above the heavy breathing of the room's occupants.

"All right," said Tosh, breaking the silence. "Let's say we were to believe you." She continued stumbling over the words as her incredulity battled with her inability to remember the various terms and concepts which Jack had just spewed at them. "Let's say you did meet this…the Doctor…in 1940's London. Let's say, and I'm not saying I do believe this, but let's just say you know this…this man…who we've been lead to believe is some sort of extra-terrestrial guru of all things apocalyptic…who is apparently the one good chance we have of saving the universe…who has a time machine, which also is a spaceship, which allows him to travel to any place that ever was or ever will be…why, for the love of Pete…" Here Tosh's composure failed her. Ianto, however, had clearly been paying attention and was able to pick up the slack.

"Why on earth would someone like that just invite_ you_ on his ship?"

"Ah," said Jack, brightening at the thought that maybe, just maybe, his troupe was beginning to come around. "That's easy." He smiled broadly at them. "It was because of a girl."

At any other time the coordinated eye rolling of the four members of his team would have been comical.

"I'm serious," Jack said for the second time in only a few minutes, realizing that he was rapidly losing what little ground he had gained with his friends. "He invited me on the TARDIS because Rose wanted him to, because she liked me and saw something in me that…" His voice trailed away and his eyes misted. He crossed his arms again, somewhat more violently this time, and twisted away from the others in the room so as to avoid their eyes and their perpetually unbelieving looks. "She saw something in me that no one else ever had before. Something more than just a thief, a con-man, and a useless lay-about." When he turned back to them his eyes were slightly red, and very hard. And for the first time since the confusing conversation had started, they were the ones unable to meet his gaze.

Gwen looked away, her brow knitting in concentration. "Okay," she said slowly. "I believe you. I don't know why I believe you, other than that it would explain a lot about…well…" She looked back up at him then. "You." Jack smiled at her. He knew they would all come around eventually, but it had hurt a little, that they hadn't believed him. That even with all the crazy, unexplainable things they had seen; even with all the times he had proved himself a good guy, a stand up character and a savior of the earth; they still saw the rogue in him first…the close lipped boss…the liar. "Just one thing," Gwen continued, "Who is this Rose person?"

"The woman in the message," Jack explained. "She knew the Doctor even before I did. Introduced us actually."

"Wait," said Owen, shaking his head, "You know the girl in the video?"

/

"-But by the time they figured it out, the atmosphere was almost totally degraded and-" the Doctor swung around, his arms raised expansively at his sides for added effect, to find Donna fast asleep in her chair. His arms dropped slowly to his sides as he visibly deflated. Sighing, he slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and leaned back against the console. Donna reposed ungracefully in the chair before him with her feet tucked beneath her. Her head lolled against the seat-back and the resulting strain on her neck caused nearly inaudible snores to rumble through her chest. Auburn lashes lay delicately over her pale cheeks and a loose chignon of her hair curled like a fox tail over her shoulder. Her teacup was still perched precariously upon her knee.

The Doctor smiled sadly at her. It was not the first time she had fallen asleep on him like this. Not the first time she had slipped into the control room under the pretense of wanting tea and good conversation, only to collapse with exhaustion when her natural pluck and determination failed to keep it at bay any longer. With a practiced air, the Doctor approached the console chair on silent feet, and removed the cup and saucer from its place so deftly that his red haired companion didn't even murmur at the disturbance. As quietly as he could, he collected his own beverage, now gone cold and murky, from its spot on top of the control panel and headed off to deposit all in the kitchen sink.

He hadn't made it ten feet before the TARDIS gave a sudden and unexpected lurch and he, the china cups and saucers, and the cold tea all went crashing to the floor with a noise that, combined with the piercing screams of Donna reverberating through the control room, were quite enough to scour all futile, self-pitying thoughts from his mind.


	4. Chapter 3

"Look," Jack continued exasperatedly, "She's not just some girl. She's Rose and we were friends…good friends…and stop smirking Gwen, not that kind of friends." Gwen did not stop smirking and Jack decided to let it go.

"How exactly," asked Tosh sensibly, "Did you ever meet the girl in the video?"

"Well now," Jack temporized, "That's an interesting story. See, I was hovering cloaked not too far from-"

"No," Tosh cut him off before he could get into the full swing of his tale, "I mean, she's from another universe. Can this TARDIS thingy cross realities as well?"

"Yes," said Jack. "And no." His face darkened as he realized exactly how hard it was to explain this convoluted situation to his crew. "I've never been to any alternate universes. I met Rose and the Doctor right here, in this universe's London."

"So," Ianto interjected, "This lady in the video…is some sort of…alternate Rose. Different from the one you know."

"No," said Jack, shaking his head sadly. "They're the same. I mean, my Rose and the Rose in the tape are the same individual. There was no Rose originally in that universe. She crossed over to the other side."

"In the…oh, what the hell did you call it again…"

Jack fixed Owen with a withering glance. "TARDIS," he replied.

"Whatever."

"And no," Jack said. "Well, not the last time anyways."

"This is not getting any clearer, Jack," Gwen groused.

Jack grunted and walked behind his desk. With the comforting wood expanse separating him from his infuriating colleagues, Jack felt a little less claustrophobic and a little more like perhaps he could go on with his story unmolested. He leaned with his palms against the edge of the desk, took a deep breath, and tried to get it all out in one fell swoop.

"Look, I don't know exactly what happened. All I know is that the three of us - the Doctor, Rose, and I - were traveling around the universe, saving worlds and having a grand old time. Then…" and here Jack paused slightly and closed his eyes, as if in pain. "Then we got separated. Or, at least I did. I spent the better part of a century trying to catch up with them again. To find the Doctor. And when I found him, Rose was gone. He said she'd gotten sucked over into some alternate universe and that…that she couldn't get back." Jack looked up at his team through the carelessly handsome sweep of his dark bangs. "And all I know is that it had something to do with the Army of Ghosts and the destruction at Canary Wharf."

"You mean Torchwood," said Ianto, cottoning on. "It had something to do with us. She's trapped in some bizzarro alternate universe because of what we did." Jack nodded and Ianto's brow darkened. The team was silent for a moment, contemplating as they so often did, the bad work that Torchwood had done in the past; the vast network of sins it seemed they'd never fully make up for, no matter how hard they tried.

"Well, I've got a question," Owen said, breaking in on their somber mood. "If it took you a hundred years to find this guy the last time what makes you so sure you can find him now?" Jack watched as horrified realization spread across his friends' faces. He stood up and extended his hand in a calming motion.

"It's all right," he smiled, slipping a small cellular phone out of his trousers pocket with his other hand and flipping it open with a flick of his thumb, "I've got his number."

"What," said Gwen, "He's got a cell phone?"

"No, not exactly," Jack squinted at the scrolling contacts list on the tiny square screen. "But Martha Jones does." A second passed as everyone in the office who was not Jack exchanged perpetually frustrated glances, and as one replied:

"Who the hell is Martha Jones?!"

/

Martha stumbled into the open doorway of the control room, a pink towel wrapped in a turban about her head. Falling against the doorframe and barely catching herself, she darted a terrified glance at the central column. The Doctor was holding tightly to one of the larger levers (which Martha had always suspected had no purpose other than to serve as a handrail), having barely kept to his feet himself. Donna, by now, was clinging to the armrests of the chair with a white knuckled death grip; her mouth a slim white line of teeth behind lips stretched thin with fear.

"What's going on?" Martha asked as another stomach turning heave of the TARDIS sent her careening into one of the support columns. She latched onto it for dear life and turned again to the center of the room. Surrounded by the whine of error alarms and bathed in the pulsing blue-green glow of the central column, the Doctor grinned insanely back at her.

"No idea whatsoever," he said brightly, as if he found the whole idea of being them tossed about his ship like so many coins in a child's piggy bank the height of fun. As if to emphasize this point the TARDIS rolled again, causing the Doctor to nearly collapse to his knees, held up only by his single handhold, and swinging Martha to the opposite side of her safety column. The pink towel, having had considerably more of a ride than it could handle, slid to the floor, leaving Martha's black hair to curl wetly against her back. Donna clung to her bolted seat, turning slightly green with the sickening motion of the ship.

"Well, what did you do?!" Martha repeated with exasperation as the Doctor hauled himself back to his feet.

"Nothing," he said, turning his attention to the wildly blinking lights of the control panel with a look of concern. "We were just having tea," he explained, waving his hand absently at the collection of china shards and tea remains littering the floor, and forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be holding on.

The next lurch sent him flying to the floor panels.

"Well you must have done something!" Martha continued, once the Doctor had picked himself up and resumed his grip.

"Not a thing," he said, sounding truly surprised at the notion, and scanning the cryptic green messages flashing across his readout screen with intense curiosity. "She seems to be doing it herself. Funny that." The Doctor's brow creased and he started pulling levers and pushing buttons seemingly at random.

"What!?" Martha was shouting now over the din. She glanced at Donna, wondering if the Doctor had been referring to their mutual friend, but the confused look on Donna's face convinced her otherwise. He must be talking about the TARDIS then. He often spoke of _her_ this way, like it was a real person with a mind of its own. Martha supposed that if any machine could be said to have a mind, then the TARDIS certainly would; however, it was her personal belief, despite what the Doctor might intimate, that there was only living mind in charge of the TARDIS, and that was the Doctor himself.

Donna, speaking for the first time since the convulsions had started, asked, "Are we going somewhere?"

The Doctor's eyes flicked again over his screen. "Yes," he answered simply.

"Where then?" Martha shouted.

"I'm not entirely sure about that just yet." His eyes flicked over to her briefly before returning to their study. "Sorry, little busy at the moment." He grabbed yet more levers, twisted several knobs and made what seemed a vain attempt to open one of the front panels for a look inside it all, but was stymied by his complete inability to stay stationary for more than a few seconds at a time. The violent jerking motions of the ship had not lessened since they began. As more and more lights brightened the console into a virtual Christmas tree, the sound of competing alarms reached a crescendo. Beneath all the ruckus, the tinny strains of "Rule, Britannia!" could just barely be made out.

"Bloody hell," Martha said, wrapping her arms more tightly around her column, "Who would be calling me at a time like this."

/

"Hello, you have reached the voice mail of Doctor Martha Jones. I can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and a short message I'll get back to you as soon as I'm available. If this is a medical emergency, please contact the nurses' desk of Mercy Hospital or else page me at . . ."

The message droned on in Jack's ear as he flashed a winning smile at his team, which he was not entirely sure would convince them that he would find a way around this new wrinkle in his plan. A piercing beep caused him to flinch and he turned towards the back wall of his office in order to compose his message in the relative solitude its blank surface provided.

"Umm….hi, Martha?" Jack could have smacked himself in the forehead at his lame opening. "Jack Harkness. Look, I know it's been a little while, but …well, I kind of need to talk to the Doctor." Great, he thought, I now sound both lame and needy. "It's rather urgent," he went on, "And I figure that you know how to reach him in a pinch." A thought struck him then; the last time he'd talked to Martha she'd been Earth-side, but with intentions to rejoin the Doctor in the not too distant future. "Heck, you might even be with him right now."

"Regardless," he went on, realizing that he was running out of recording time, "I'd really appreciate it if you could call me back. It's currently," Jack checked his wristwatch, "Eleven-oh-five a.m., on Saturday, November 22nd…ah, 2007." Jack racked his mind for any additional information that might be necessary. "Were in Torchwood 3's offices in Cardiff…Earth of course. Ummmm…." Jack looked around at his team, "And it's really, really important." The phone beeped in his ear again and Jack snapped shut the now useless device.

"So that's it then," said Owen derisively, "We just wait for her to call?" Although the others did not voice their concerns, the feeling was general. They didn't have time for this. They didn't have time for anything, let alone waiting for some flighty girl Jack had on speed dial to return his messages. _That_ sort of thing could take weeks.

"She'll call back, all right," Jack assured them heatedly. "I told her it was important."

"Jack," Gwen soothed, "It's not that we doubt your friend will come through. It's just we don't have a lot of time to wait on her."

"You think I don't know that?" he replied sharply, "You think I like waiting around like some pathetic bridegroom? Believe me, I wouldn't be doing this if I had any other choice." Gwen's cheeks colored, and she looked away. Jack realized suddenly that his tone had been rather harsh and that he was likely taking his own anxieties out on his friends. Not a good plan to foster future team interaction.

If there is a future, he mused.

Sighing, Jack collapsed into his desk chair. Steepling his fingers, he swiveled to observe his entire team. They were each presenting him with matching worried faces. "Look," he said in a calmed voice, "I'm aware that the situation is drastic. Trust me, I'm not ignoring the seriousness of the warning we've been given. I trust Rose with my life and if she says the sky is falling, I duck and cover. But I also trust her assessment of the situation, and if she thinks we need the Doctor." He leveled his gaze at his teammates and raised his brows emphatically, "We do."

"So," he continued, "We wait. And if anyone else has any bright ideas about what we can do to try stopping this thing from exploding in the meantime, please be my guest." Jack held his hand palm up towards them, inviting any suggestions. Owen snorted, but turned away. Tosh bit her lower lip unconsciously, her forehead creased in thought. Ianto returned to studious contemplation of his tea. Gwen looked thoughtful for a moment, then opened her mouth as if to say something.

She was interrupted by a pulsating screech that approximated something between scraped piano strings and a belt-less vacuum cleaner…with a little humpback whale song thrown in for good measure. In other words, unmistakable.

Jack leapt from his seat and found himself crowded with his team in the doorway to his office. Everybody had stepped away from the pulsing blue light which seemed to be irradiating the back corner of the room. They watched as, slowly, a large blue police call box materialized in Jack's office. As soon as the box lost all appearance of insubstantiality, the dreadful noise ceased and Jack's desk papers, which had been scattered in some strange, apparently source-less wind, settled fluttering to the floor.

"See," said Jack, casting a superior glance over the half-huddled forms of his team, "Told you it would work." Smiling as broadly as his face would allow, and stepping forward into what little space remained in his office, now crowded with a desk, 5 people, and a blue police box, and threw his arms out in greeting (barely avoiding smacking Ianto in the face in his exuberance). Teeth flashing, Jack aimed his address at where he suspected the outside camera was placed.

"You got my message!"


	5. Chapter 4

Several moments later, Jack's arms started getting tired, and he lowered them to his sides. Cocking his head in consternation, he addressed the blue box. "Hello?"

"That's it then," muttered Owen behind him, "He's stepped off the deep end this time."

Jack twisted around with a baleful glare. The other Torchwood members looked at Owen witheringly. The blank look plastered on Owen's face satisfied absolutely no one. "What," Owen argued, "I'm not the one talking to a box."

"It's not a box," Jack explained, "It's a TARDIS." Stepping up towards the door, he rapped his knuckles against it repeatedly. "Hello!" he tried again more loudly, "Anyone in there? Doctor? Martha? Hello?"

"It's made of wood," Tosh observed, incredulous.

"What's a police call box?" Ianto asked, reading.

"It's like a phone booth," Gwen answered him, understandably knowledgeable on the subject, "Except the phone was only for use by the police. They used it to call for backup and the like, and sometimes they'd lock drunks and other undesirables inside until they could be taken away to jail." She pursed her lips thoughtfully, "You don't see 'em anymore though. Been phased out. Archaic really."

"And made of wood!" Tosh repeated, with even greater incredulity.

"It's not made of wood," Jack stated, stepping back and raking his eyes over its surface. Perhaps there was something he was missing, some other indication of why he was getting no response from within. "And it's not a police call box. It just looks exactly like one."

"Right," Owen drawled, "And everybody glared at _me_."

Refusing to signify Owen's words with a response, Jack stepped forward again and raised his hand to knock. The door swung inwards and Jack stopped himself only inches before connecting with the pert nose of a red-haired woman he didn't recognize at all.

If the woman was at all surprised to be peering out of a police call box into the main office of a secret underground alien defense program, or to be benignly threatened by the raised fist of the office's owner, she didn't show it. "Hallo," she said brightly, "You Jack Harkness then?"

"Errr…" said Jack, momentarily forgetting his own name, "Yes?"

"Thought so," said the redhead, with a self assured nod.

Recovering slightly and dropping his arm Jack continued, "And…you are?"

The redhead thrust her hand at him waist high, "Donna Noble. Pleased to meet you. Heard all about you from Martha, of course." Jack shook the proffered hand wonderingly.

"Bet you're wondering where the Doctor is," Donna went on.

"The thought had crossed my mind."

"Busy sweeping up the teacups," she stated, as if that explained everything perfectly. She cocked her head and gazed around Jack to where his team was gathered against the door jamb. "They friends of yours?"

"Yes." Jack stepped back to give Donna a better view. "They're the members of my team. The one on the left is Gwen-"

"Sorry, sorry! I'm here now!" A breathless Martha Jones saved Jack more uncomfortable introductions by arriving that very moment in the TARDIS doorway. She was busy pulling her slick black hair into a hasty ponytail, leaving a few damp strands plastered to her face. She was dressed in baggy sweatpants and a shirt which appeared to have been put on backwards in her hurry. Her feet were clad in fluffy pink slippers.

This was not exactly the impression Jack had hoped Martha would make on his Torchwood team. Martha, however, overcame all his trepidations by throwing her arms about his neck, and hugging him tightly in greeting. "Jack! It's been too long!" Jack smiled into her hair, and hugged her just as enthusiastically back.

"You got my message then?" he said, gently detaching her arms from his shoulders.

"Sorry, what message?"

Jack blinked. "The one I left on your cell phone. The one telling you to come here; telling you that I needed to see the Doctor."

"Oh," said Martha, glancing over her shoulder, "Come to think of it my phone did go off a few minutes back." She turned back to Jack with an apologetic look. "Sorry, I didn't answer. We ran into some turbulence."

"Turbulence?" Tosh piped up from the group behind Jack, "In space?"

"And time," added Ianto thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Martha replied somewhat belligerently, peering around Jack to his friends and giving him a wary eye in the process. "Who're they? Civilians?"

"They are Torchwood," he replied proudly, and gestured dramatically towards them. He pointed at Gwen. "That there is my second in command, Gwe-"

"Right, now what's all this about," the Doctor boomed, filling the TARDIS doorway and wringing his hands with a dishtowel. His blue pinstriped suit was rumpled and his normally unruly hair was even more askew than normal. A pair of thick rimmed, somewhat old fashioned reading glasses were perched on top of his head, apparently forgotten there. The Torchwood team, as if a single organism, collectively blinked in surprise.

An irrepressible smile stretched across Jack's face, lighting it like a sunrise. "Hello Doctor."

"You," the Doctor said, apparently just noticing Jack and pointing an accusatory finger in his direction. "I should have known. You owe me a tea set." Tossing the dish towel to the floor, he stepped out of the TARDIS and enveloped Jack in a bear hug that put Martha's earlier gesture of affection to shame. Stepping back from the embrace and holding Jack by his upper arms, the Time Lord stared down at him severely.

"Now," he said sternly, "What exactly did you do to the TARDIS? No, never mind that," he amended, "How did you do it? No, forget that." The Doctor stepped away and shifted his eyes to the ceiling of Jack's office in a considering manner. "Why? Why did you cause the TARDIS to come to this god-forsaken little hole?" The Doctor strode over towards the windows overlooking the remainder of the complex and stared out. "No," he finished excitedly, swinging back around, "Better yet." Leaning back against the row of windows and crooking a thumb at the remaining Torchwood members, he asked, "Who are they?"

"Doctor, Allow me to introduce my team," Jack said with pride, indicating the different members as he went. They, uncomfortable, nodded silent greetings at the three strange visitors and allowed Jack to make the introductions. "This," he said, indicating the soft eyed Asian woman standing off to one side, "Is Toshiko Sato, our resident techie. Owen Harper, our medical expert."

"Ah, that's _Doctor_ Owen Harper," Owen interjected. Jack stared hard at him and paused a threatening moment before continuing.

"Ianto Jones, our…uhh…" Jack racked his mind for some description for Ianto's position that sounded better than 'Tea boy'. "Man of all work." Jack snapped his fingers, pleased with his choice of description. Ianto, as always, looked stoic, but amused. "And last but not least is-"

"Gwyneth!" the Doctor cried, striding forward and enthusiastically clasping Gwen's hands between his own. "It can't be! Can it?" He was peering at her with great interest, bending down to stare into her eyes at her own level. Gwen, taken aback by the abrupt greeting, stared wide eyed back at the alien gentleman, shifting uncomfortably under his gaze. "Wait, no," the Doctor went on, turning his head to the side in confusion. "Is it?" he asked rhetorically, obviously not expecting Gwen to answer his dubious line of questioning.

The Doctor stepped back from Gwen dropping her hands, and with a strange almost haunted look clouding his eyes. "You're not, are you?" Gwen sputtered.

"Gwen Cooper," Jack provided, looking perplexedly at the Doctor. What the hell was he getting on about with Gwen? A corner of the Doctor's mouth twisted up, as if he was trying to work out a particularly difficult thermodynamic equation. Jack didn't much like the idea of any of his team members being part of some Time Lord mind puzzle. The Doctor seemed on the brink of questioning Gwen further; questions that none of them had time for (and which Jack suspected Gwen would prefer not to have to answer).

"Team," he interjected, breaking some of the tension, "This is Dr. Martha Jones, Donna…uh…Noble." Jack looked at Donna for confirmation. Donna gave a brief wave to the group. "And," Jack paused for effect, "The Doctor."

"Doctor…who?" Ianto queried. This was apparently enough to drag the Doctor out of his reverie of Gwen-contemplation.

"Nah, just the Doctor. That's all."

"So what," asked Owen defensively, "You don't got a real name?"

"Course," the Doctor replied, either painfully oblivious to or pointedly ignoring the rudeness of Owen's question, "Jack already told you."

"I'm the Doctor."


	6. Chapter 5

"Trust me," said Jack, leading everyone out of the office and into the main room of the Torchwood complex, "You want to see this."

Away above them the cement sides of the circular hub stretched up towards the roofing streets and sidewalks of Cardiff. The silver central column loomed over them as they entered the main room, a monolith to the existence of the rift and all the problems it had caused. Blue patterns flashed over its shining surface from the itinerant spinning screen saver laser shapes flickering off of rows upon rows of top of the line computers. The room spiraled out from the center into workstations that varied in their complexity and messiness based upon who among the team they belonged to. Everywhere, half empty coffee cups competed for space with stacks of case reports and bits of alien technology. Wires hung from every available cross beam and screen bank, curling about each other in a hopeless tangle. Walkways criss-crossed almost randomly throughout the space; allowing for navigation of the area, but studiously avoiding the sterile, hard-cornered arrangement of cubicles. In the one fairly open space, a decrepit basketball backboard hung stood forlornly next to a battered futon and a cluttered coffee table.

Tucked away in one corner was a work-bench littered with scraps of metal and spare wire. Behind it was a cork board almost completely hidden behind pages and pages of drawings of various complex machines that were tacked to its surface. A welding mask sat upon the table, leaning against a work lamp and staring sightlessly back at the three visitors, who wandered like wide-eyed tourists through the vast open space that constituted Torchwood central.

"It's huge!" Donna said, spinning in place on the grate covered floor and staring upwards in childlike awe. "But," she started, turning quizzically towards Jack, "There's only five of you."

Gwen snorted. "You need a place this big to fit Jack's ego."

"Hey!" Jack protested, "I resemble that remark!"

"Do you all live here?" asked Martha, who had wandered over to the little sitting area they had set up, and was sifting through the pizza boxes layering the table. Ianto, seeing what she was doing, hurried over and, with many muffled apologies, started picking up. Jack momentarily considered telling him not to bother, but decided to leave well enough alone. Ianto certainly had a good excuse for his lax treatment of the common room; the past few days had left little time for breath, let alone cleaning detail.

"No, thank goodness," Tosh answered, helpfully tossing a spare coffee cup into a bin with a less than pleasant grimace at its congealed contents.

Donna picked up the basketball that was sitting on Owen's desk, and bounced it once experimentally. It made a halfhearted twang against the metal floor and barely rose back up to her waiting hands. The team had been in the middle of a heated two-on-two game, with Ianto watching from the sidelines and timing it all with his stopwatch, when the rift alarms had started going off and everything had gone quickly to pot. The ball would need a refill before they played again. _If_ they ever played again. Donna quirked an eyebrow at him.

"The boys and girls play together here," Jack noted in a slightly husky voice. He couldn't stop himself from flashing her a sultry smile, and was pleased to see her blush and return it.

"Oi!" the Doctor admonished, his face dark over the computer screen he was examining.

"Sorry," Jack said, sauntering over to type in his password. The multicolored line graph of rift activity disappeared and Jack began opening the files that his team had spent the past several days decrypting and deciphering. "Couldn't resist."

"Here," he continued, opening up the program he was most interested in showing his guests. "Take a look at this." He shifted away from the screen and motioned the Doctor towards the chair directly in front of it. The Doctor slipped the thick black glasses from their position on top of his head, and slid them into position on the bridge of his nose. Martha and Donna hurried over to the console, followed more slowly by the remainder of the Torchwood team who had seen the whole thing before.

The screen was open to a basic video program, and the initial scene of an eventual playback was frozen in a blur upon its surface. Although difficult to make out with particularity, it appeared to show a young blonde woman, sitting uncomfortably in a tan business suit that fit her poorly across the shoulders, and staring out of the screen from across a wide expanse of wood desktop. Her hands were folded carefully before her, and her hair pulled back in a rather severe pony-tail. She looked, for all the world, like a high powered solicitor about to slide her final offer of settlement across the table. She appeared prim and focused, and anyone who didn't know her would have called her frighteningly stern. However, two people in the room, at least, knew her better than that.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed. For a moment he said nothing, then turned disturbingly dark eyes upon Jack. "What is this?" There was accusation, tinged with anger in his voice.

"A message," Jack replied, "From across the rift." He glanced up into the confused faces of Martha and Donna. "From another universe."

"It can't be." The Doctor said heatedly, turning back towards the image splayed across the computer's face. "It's impossible." There was less heat in the latter comment, though, and more honest confusion. "The rift to Pete's universe should be closed." He closed his eyes then, and slipping his fingers beneath his glasses, rubbed tiredly at his closed lids as if trying to squeeze away the image on the screen. "We closed it at Canary Warf."

"Well whatever you did it sure hasn't stopped everyone and their brother from coming across the rift around here." Jack looked crossly at Owen. He was standing somewhat away from the group, a perpetually pissed off frown on his face and his arms crossed defensively before him. "Weevils, people from all sorts of time periods, technology pretty much guaranteed to drive you bonkers if you ever use it, crazy-ass alien-"

"Owen!" Jack cut off his rant before he could really get going. The two men stared at each other in open challenge for a moment, before Owen mulishly dropped his eyes and looked away, sulking.

Martha had been watching the interaction between the two attentively, but Donna, it appeared, had been observing the Doctor's reaction. Jack saw a spark of realization cross her face and she stepped closer to the computer desk. "That's her," she breathed. The question was aimed at the Doctor, but as he seemed unable, or unwilling, to answer her query, Donna turned to Jack instead for confirmation. "That's Rose." Jack nodded, and watched silently as Martha turned wide and suddenly concerned eyes back to the screen.

"And this is why you called the TARDIS here?" The Doctor's eyes were open again as he gazed at Rose's image. Dark thunderheads seemed to breed in their depths, though his face remained comparatively expressionless.

"Yes," Jack answered, "And no." Everyone in the room turned to him for an explanation. "All I did was call Martha. I knew you'd want to see what we'd found and that you needed to be here. I've no idea how the TARDIS actually got here…how she managed to find us three stories below Cardiff proper…how, or why, she came at this particular time…" He trailed off letting them form their own understanding of the strangeness of the situation.

"She did it herself," the Doctor mumbled to himself, apparently forgetting, for the moment, that he was in company. "Clever girl." He was playing with the computer mouse, obviously trying to figure out how the prehistoric piece of technology worked. Jack reached over his shoulder and took the device from him. With not a little bit of trepidation, he clicked the playback on, and listened as anticipation sucked the collective breath out of the room.

The playback began with Rose clearing her throat.

"Greetings people of alternate Earth."

"Well, that's not at all over-dramatic," quipped Martha, under her breath.

"I am speaking to you from a parallel universe across the rift in space time which currently exists between both our worlds in the locations of London, Cardiff, Glasgow and various other localities across the globe." Rose smiled. "I know that may be a bit hard to believe, but it's the truth. And if you have any memory of what happened at Canary Warf - and I think you do - you'll know that what I say is not only possible, but likely to be true. I know that many people, on both sides of the rift, fought and died that day to ensure that the connection between our two worlds remain closed forever. To prevent any further nightmares from slipping through."

The Rose on the video shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but her eyes didn't waiver from the screen, as if she were reading from prepared notes on a teleprompter.

"I am contacting you today because your world…our worlds, really…are in grave danger. At this very moment, the rift is breaching. A tiny hole is being poked in the membrane between the universes, and though it is currently small, it will soon grow; and grow at an exponential rate. Right now it is all we can do to send you this weak signal across the breach, but quickly it will become large enough to allow for considerable mass and energy to pass through. And, if it reaches that point it will start to collapse our two universes upon themselves and…" Rose stopped there. "Well, I don't have to tell you how bad things were last time. To say the least, this would be significantly worse."

Rose paused to let that disturbing information sink in, then pressed a button recessed into the table before her. On the screen, above her left ear, a three dimensional diagram appeared and began slowly revolving. At first glance it appeared to be a mess of glowing blue lines and curves, but Jack, who had some training in these matters, recognized that part of what it was intended to depict was an event horizon.

"It's a 3-D representation of the rift," he explained, for Donna and Martha's benefit. The Doctor glared sideways at him for interrupting and Jack cut his explanation short.

"Our scientists have been working on this matter from some time now," Rose went on. "As you can see, the Hole, as we've been calling it, appears to have started on our end of the rift and is drilling its way towards you." In the diagram some of the otherwise unintelligible lines appeared to move in response to Rose's comments. Martha could see that it did look like something was boring its way through something else. Or perhaps funneling through was a better description, since the Hole appeared to be significantly wider on one end. "We don't know what started it, but we began seeing the increased rift effects caused by the Hole approximately 9 months ago. You, however, should only start experiencing them now." Rose pushed the button again and the diagram disappeared.

"Our scientists are unsure exactly how much time you will have until the Hole is wide enough on your end of the rift to allow a breach like that you experienced with the Cybermen." Jack noticed Ianto's shudder at that last comment. "However," the Rose in the video went on, "They are fairly certain you will have nowhere near the amount of time we have had."

Though she kept her face blank and professional, Rose's eyes darkened with the knowledge of what she had to say next. "For nine months the best minds of our world have been working day and night, trying to find a way to stop this breach in the rift, or even to slow it, but to date, all of our efforts have been in vain. It has become clear that the best efforts of our best people are not going to be good enough."

"It is time we reached out for help."

Rose pushed another button on the desktop. A screen opened again above her left ear, this time it appeared to flash through hundreds of documents. Plans. Charts. Tables full of numbers and readings. Margins filled with desperate handwritten notes. "We send you now, all our information. All our work. The sweat of all our collective brows, in the hope that maybe adding the best minds of your universe to the mix will lead us to a solution." Rose's fist clenched briefly and a hopeful spark lit in her eyes. "Perhaps," she said solemnly, "Working together, from across space and time, we can find the answer and save both our worlds."

"However," Rose continued, "This is not the only reason we are contacting you today."

"We have reason to believe that the transmission of this communication may make the rift even more unstable, that it may contribute to the advancement of the Hole and give both our scientists less time to work on the problem. But we felt it was worth the risk," Rose arched her eyebrow, "Because your universe possesses a necessary advantage which our lacks, and which we both desperately need." Again, Rose reached out across the desk, and deliberately tapped the button. Immediately, the flipping pages of data and drawings were replaced by a single picture.

It was simply drawn in basic colors. The artist, though not a master by any stretch of the imagination, had managed to capture his subject fairly well in simple colored pencil lines; which was especially impressive given the fact that the artist had almost certainly never seen his subject in real life. The picture showed a man, tall and lanky with lopsided brown hair, dressed in a rumpled pinstripe suit overtopped with a long tan colored coat. His hands were stuffed roughly into the pockets of the coat and he leaned with a brooding air against what looked like the corner of a blue colored building. The eyes were too small in the picture, and too overshadowed by the dark brow ridges the man peered from beneath, to tell their color; but there was no doubt that the gaze of the man was intense. Nor was there any doubt among the individuals crowded around the small computer screen as to the accuracy of the man's features; they had the living, breathing model sitting right before them.

Donna wondered how the artist had managed to so perfectly capture the Look.

Rose took an audible breath, and the group as a one returned their attention to her face; they had almost forgotten, in staring at the picture before them, that she was there.

"This man," she started slowly, as if having to steel herself to her own explanation, but picking up momentum as she swung into her tale, "Is the Doctor. He has had many faces, at many different times, but as of our most recent information, this is how he appears. He has significant expertise with the rift and a great knowledge of inter-dimensional travel. He is also, not a bad shakes at fixing things." Rose gave a half smile at the last comment. "If anyone can complete the models of rift strengthening devices that our scientists have been working on, if anyone can find a way to patch the Hole, if anyone can save our two universes from imminent destruction," Rose paused for emphasis, her eyes flashing with fervent belief, "He can."

For a final time, Rose jabbed at the button on the desk and the image of the Doctor disappeared. "Find him," she said, seriously, "Find a way to bring him to your Earth. He may be the best chance that any of us have to survive. Good luck, and may God help us all."

And with that, the playback came to an end.


	7. Chapter 6

"Oh."

That was all the Doctor said, and the word floated in the silence of the room like an inappropriate laugh at a fancy dinner party. Jack watched as the Doctor lifted a slow hand to the glasses perched on the end of his nose, removed them, folded them with intense delicacy, and slipped them into some unseen pocket within his jacket. Then peering intensely at the frozen image of Rose on the screen, he leaned one elbow onto the computer desk and cupped a hand over his mouth and chin. A Rodin statue in the making. Jack wondered vaguely if this act actually helped the Time Lord to think, or whether it was intended merely as an excuse not to talk.

"So," said Martha, filling the stillness, "Guess it's a good thing we came, then."

"Wherever did you find this?" the Doctor asked the room at large, his voice half mumbled into his palm.

"On the internet," Jack replied somewhat sheepishly.

Donna's head whipped around in a red fury, "What, you havin' a laugh?"

"No really," Jack explained, "We got it off the internet." Donna and Martha shot him equally dubious looks. The Doctor continued to stare at the screen, utterly still, but apparently listening. "About 4 days ago we started getting a lot of radio interference here in Cardiff. Television's too, got all fuzzy. We figured it was just sunspots or something, but it turns out it was a transmission sent through the rift. A massive transmission."

"I was going to check out what was causing the interference," Tosh interjected quickly, defensive, "But then we got busy with the weevils."

"Right," Jack smiled comfortingly at her. This wasn't her fault; none of them had thought to check whether the interference had a more sinister origin. It had coincided with a dramatic increase in weevil activity and…well…the cells were now full, but the mysterious interference had gone uninvestigated. The lives of the citizenry had taken precedence over a mildly interesting astronomic phenomenon. Torchwood couldn't really be blamed. "However, some hacker kid out of Brighton did think it was worth looking into. It really came through looking, for all intents and purposes, like white noise, but after cleaning up all the junk data in the signal, whoever it was managed to figure out that it was actually a whole bunch of information transmitted in a variety of formats."

"Not only that, but he managed to decode the encryptions protecting it all. And once he had this video freed up, he posted it to every crackpot conspiracy theorist website out there with a big question," Jack held on hand up before him as if he were placing the hacker's message onto a theatre marquee "Have You Seen This Man?"

"We found out about it because we regularly monitor the conspiracy web ring," Gwen said. "You know, on the off chance something real does pop up."

"But we still thought it was bonkers," Ianto added. "Tosh said she'd take a look at it, but we'd probably still be roaming the streets of Cardiff with tranq guns and netting if someone hadn't sent Jack an anonymous email with the video attached."

"Now that was something of a shock." Jack remembered when he first opened the message and saw Rose. He had been leaning back in his swivel desk chair and had literally tipped the thing over backwards. Gwen, who had been thumbing through reports in his filing cabinet at the time, nearly died laughing; that was, until she saw his face.

"All the resources and alien technology in the world, and some internet junkie beats us to the punch," Owen muttered mutinously.

"Scary thing is they've got it all right," Jack continued. "As soon as I saw the video I had Tosh run all sorts of scans on the rift. It's ripping open, a pinprick puncture that's going to end up splitting the whole damn thing right down the middle. And when it does…" Jack trailed off, partially because it made him ill to continue, but mostly because he really didn't understand the science behind it.

"The universe will basically collapse on itself," Tosh supplied for him, "Using the rift here as sort of a fulcrum for it all. The same thing looks like it's happening on the other side of the rift, they just got wind of it a lot earlier. Because of the nature of the rift and the two universes, the collapses should occur simultaneously. Which is a problem because…well… the whole process is being dramatically accelerated on our side." Tosh glanced worriedly up at the red glowing electric clock Jack had set on top of Owen's desk to remind everyone. Her actions drew the eyes of everyone else in the room. The clock was counting backwards slowly. From 32 hours, 41 minutes, and 35 seconds…34…33... "It doesn't leave us much time," she added needlessly

"Is this all there is?"

Everyone's attention turned back to the Doctor. He hadn't moved a muscle since the video ended. "No," said Jack, reaching for the mouse again. "But it's the only thing that made it onto the world wide web. After we figured out that it was for real and important we made a program to erase all copies of the recorded message out there and started decrypting on our own." Jack clicked on a file folder. "Turns out there's a whole lot more than just home movies."

Rows upon rows of files lined up on the screen. Jack started clicking on them randomly and various images flashed across the screen. Blueprints for some complex machine, log books full of readings and numbers, and an entire folder consisting of nothing but pencil drawings of the Doctor, the TARDIS, and other related items.

"Hah!" said Donna, pointing at the screen triumphantly, "That's a sonic screwdriver!"

"That's amazing," Martha leaned forward onto the desk in order to get a better look. "How on earth did they make all this?"

"You'd be surprised what you can get done with months to plan and unlimited resources." Jack continued to click, flashing through an image depicting the TARDIS control room from the inside. "Wanna see something really neat?" Jack clicked on a particular file and a drawing popped up of none other than Jack himself. He was wearing the same long military style coat he always did, hands poised on his hips and chest thrown out in a pose that could only be described as 'dashing'. A self possessed grin stretched from ear to ear. The former time agent was standing next to what looked like a regular London pillar-box, and with him, looking somewhat surly, was a short haired man with strangely oversized ears and a black leather jacket.

"Who's that?" Martha asked, intrigued. Jack flashed a worried glance at her, not sure whether he should say anything.

"Never mind," the Doctor broke in, saving them all from a slew of inevitable and tedious questions, and taking the mouse from Jack started to quickly peruse through the thousands of alternate universe documents. Images flashed across the screen far too fast for the humans standing behind him to register, let alone read. But the Doctor's eyes slipped over all, moving back and forth at an alarming clip; reading, taking it in, remembering. "They've got plans in here for machines intended to close the rift entirely, not just patch it up- now that's a bit ambitious of them- theories on rift displacement and multiple-universe effects, devices for converting rift energy into a solar shield…now why would they need that?" The Doctor's forehead creased and he started browsing even faster.

Jack had to look away from the wildly flipping screen before it started to make him nauseous. The rest of his team were throwing looks of amazement at the Doctor and Jack. They had realized, of course, that the Doctor was special, that he was an alien, and that Jack, whose opinion they respected, held him in the highest regard. They had not, however, guessed at exactly the kind of abilities the Doctor would be bringing to the table.

"Could use him around the office," Owen murmured, impressed. Martha and Donna shared a smirk of satisfaction, gloating over their traveling companion.

"Hang on," the Doctor said, the cursor hovering over a little yellow folder labeled 'DOCTOR', "What's this then?"

"Dunno," Jack replied, as the Doctor clicked on the folder and a little password protection window blipped into the center of the screen. "It's locked. No one's had a chance to hack into it yet. I tried all the passwords I could think of. Time Lord. TARDIS. Jack Harkness is God." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled cheekily at Martha, who rolled her eyes. "Any ideas Doc?" he asked, turning back to the screen.

Slowly, the Doctor pulled the keyboard towards him, and typed out a single phrase.

BAD WOLF

Immediately, the tiny widow changed to show a flying file and the progression of a quick information download. Soon yet another screen popped up; the same video program that had opened before. It showed the same blonde haired woman, in the same room and well starched outfit. Only this time, her gaze into the camera seemed reserved, almost tentative. Jack looked at Martha and Donna, and then at his team. "Ummm," he started, uncomfortably aware that this was probably not meant to be something viewed by every Torchwood member and their brother, "Maybe we should…"

The Doctor clicked 'play'.

"Hello Doctor," said Rose, her hands nervously fiddling on the desk before her. "If you're listening to this then somebody there on alternate Earth was able to get our message out to you."

"And thank goodness," she continued, unable to keep a wry smile off her face and out of her voice, "'Cause we could really use your help right now. Us and them. It's up to you to save the universe again…two universes. Same old, same old, yeah?" Rose smiled for real now, a joke shared between comrades, before her eyes and her manner turned abruptly serious. She glanced down at her clenched hands before continuing.

"There's, ah, a couple of things we might have left out from the reports we gave the alternate-earthers. Didn't want to give them the wrong impression, ya know? We're sending this transmission through as soon as the rift squeaks open enough to do so. Our scientists tell us that the more time you have to work with the problem the better, but, well, I'm sure you remember how much power it takes to send something across the rift like that." She lifted her face to meet her observers' gazes, and Jack could see unshed tears brimming in her eyes.

"We're burning up the sun just to give you a warning."

Somebody in the room gasped, probably Donna. "Dear God," that was Tosh, "We received this days ago, they're probably all…" She cut off abruptly, Ianto stopping her with a light touch to the elbow, reminding her of the sensitivity of the situation. People who knew the blonde haired woman in the video, who had friends on the other side of the God-cursed rift, were in the room. Jack's grip tightened on the chair back. In the chair before him, the Doctor blinked, but gave no other sign that the revelation had given him pause.

In the confines of the little window box on the computer, Rose visibly collected herself and wiped a tear out of her eye. "We've been evacuating the planet for weeks now. Some of our alien allies have agreed to take in refugees." Her gaze wandered off to one side, as if she was remembering something. "I sent Mum and Pete off on the last transport, with little Alice of course." Her face brightened then and she turned back to face them, "Mum had a girl, by the way. Right proper little princess she is. Mum says she looks just like I did when I was little. Course there's no pictures or anything to go by…" She trailed off. "We sent away all the best minds first; physicists and Nobel prize winners and the like. Then the governmental leaders, those that could be convinced to go. Most chose to stay, to stick it out on behalf of all the citizens who couldn't get a transport berth. All of us at Torchwood plan to stay until the end, or at least," she went on, "until we know whether there's a point to leaving." She stared hard at the screen, "Until we're sure that there's still a universe to exist in."

Shifting in her chair, Rose glanced through some of the papers scattered in front of her. Reports and memos, no doubt. "Our scientists say that we'll have quite a while before the sun completely explodes, and some little time before it grows so big that we can't sustain life anymore. Days…weeks…We're going to keep evacuating as long as we can, as long as the transports keep coming…and they should keep coming for a while yet." Rose smiled then, and it was one of her old smiles. The one she would give when she'd outwitted both Jack and the Doctor, and got them to agree to do whatever it was she wanted, despite their misgivings. "I might have had something to do with that. Our _friends_ were feeling pretty guilty, yeah, what with us sacrificing our homeworld to save the universe and all."

Jack found himself smiling in response, despite the seriousness of the situation. Leave it to Rose to embarrass some alien race into submission.

"So, that's how we got in touch with you on the other side," she continued, perhaps a tad flippantly, "Just in case you were wondering." Her smile turned rueful now. "I just wanted to tell you that, we're fine here…we're all fine…well, as much as can be expected anyways…and we're going to keep fighting as long as we can. Fighting to stop this rift from opening up. Fighting to stop the end to…well, everything. Everything we know anyways. But, well..." Her eyes were pleading now. "I don't mean to go all Princess Leia on you, but the truth is we've got about as much chance of stopping this thing from ripping apart all existence as a pig has of learning to fly…so, yeah…you're kind of our only hope." Again her hands clasped one another upon the table, her fingers interlocking until the knuckles bleached white.

"We're counting on you Doctor. I'm counting on you. And I know you'll come through."

Rose took a deep breath then, and leaned back in her chair; her devastating message apparently over. The image on the screen vibrated.

"Mickey wait!" Rose cried suddenly, raising her hand in a halting motion towards the screen and looking past it. When the image came to a rest, she lowered her arm and shifted her gaze back towards the camera. Her cheeks were flushed, suddenly, as if she had been running in the cold. "Doctor I," she started. Then, with a steadying breath, she continued. "I just wanted to say…what I said before, on the be-…at Bad Wolf Bay." Rose stared out of the screen, as if she could burn a hole right through it. Her eyes were dark enough and hard enough at this moment, Jack almost believed that, even from across the distance of untold universes, maybe she could.

"I meant it," she stated simply. "Every last word."

Rose matched the look of her unseen listeners with her own steely gaze for a moment longer, then her eyes dropped one last time to the polished surface before her. Her shoulders slumped, all the energy seeming to have drained out of her after that last tirade. She spoke then, in a monotone voiced barely above a whisper. "You can turn it off now, Mickey. I'm done." A second more, and more jostling of the image was followed by the end of the clip. The playback stopped, with the final image frozen on the screen. There sat Rose Tyler, Defender of Earth, her eyes downcast and, in her whole manner, utterly defeated.


	8. Chapter 7

Jack could hear his heart thudding in his chest. It seemed to echo through his whole being like a base drum in an empty gymnasium. His heart had seemed significantly louder to him ever since…well…after his accident on the Gamestation. He had grown used to it over the centuries, the constant pulsing reminder of his disturbingly unending existence. The only time it ever bothered him anymore was at night, after everyone else had gone home to rest in their separate bedrooms, when he curled up somewhere in the bowels of the Torchwood complex looking for escape from his teammates, from the constant battle for control, from life itself. Only then, when he could literally feel the vast weight of unimagined years stretching out before him, did he hear it; his constant companion. And again in rare times like these when the cold fear of dread gripped him, the terror that he was, once again, going to lose somebody he loved, he heard it. Crashing against his ribs like waves against a deserted beachhead. Each thrust and corresponding counterthrust of its endless beating wearing away at its confinement bit by agonizingly slow bit.

Thank goodness he didn't have two of them.

The Doctor, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration, set the palms of his hands flat on the desk before him and pushed back from the computer screen. The wheeled desk chair rolled out beneath him, and Jack had to take a step back to avoid being run over as the Time Lord stood.

"You know it's funny," the Doctor was speaking to the room at large, but Jack had the distinct impression that he only thought of himself as talking to Jack, "You know where the first place I ever traveled to with Rose was? Her first TARDIS excursion?"

"No," Jack replied, staring at the squared shoulders before him.

With a great in-heave of breath the Doctor glanced up from the screen. "To the end of the earth." He turned around until Jack was before him, the chair between them. "To a luxury party ship five billion years in the future, to watch the sun explode." Jack blinked.

"Ironic," he commented.

"No," the Doctor shook his head, and marched off in the direction of the work bench. "Just a coincidence. You humans, can't even get your own language right."

Jack gave a quick look around at the other humans in the room to see if they understood what was going on any better than he did. Seeing their equally blank looks he turned quickly on his heel and followed after the Doctor, having to jog a bit to catch up with his gangly stride. The rest of the team followed more slowly behind.

"So, Doctor," Jack called after him, catching up only when he reached the crowded bench. Blueprints and diagrams were piled haphazardly all over it. The welder's mask seemed to glare accusingly at him, and Jack focused his attention on his friend. The Doctor was perusing the various machine plans tacked to the wall. "Got any brilliant ideas."

"Nope," he replied, perhaps a tad to enthusiastically; popping the 'p' at the end like it was a joke. "But hang on," his forehead creased, and he reached out to one of the diagrams and held it up to the light for better examination, "Oooohhh, this one isn't too bad."

"What's not too bad?" Jack asked, hovering by his shoulder and trying to get a better look at the drawing the Doctor was examining with such care.

"Not _brilliant_, per se," the Doctor continued, angling the paper away from Jack in his musings, "But nothing to sneeze at either." Jack raised himself up on his toes to try and get a better look, and wondered if the Doctor was holding the paper away like that on purpose. The remainder of the Torchwood gang, as well as Donna and Martha, were now arranged in a respectful semicircle around their two acknowledged leaders. "Capital idea, actually," the Doctor sounded surprised.

"What!" Jack growled in frustration.

The Doctor looked up from the sheet before him, into the eyes of the seven humans watching him intently. He managed to meet them all. It was unnerving to someone unused to his mannerisms. Donna and Martha waited patiently, knowing that, sooner or later, his own desire to prove just how smart he really was would win out over his natural reticence, and he would explain all of his thought processes to his companions. Jack, though equally familiar with the Doctor's ways, was considerably less patient with them, and stood next to him with his head tilted arrogantly and his hands perched aggressively on his hips. The remainder of the Torchwood team, being only passingly familiar with alien life forms in general, and lacking entirely in experience with Time Lords, collectively wavered under that burning gaze. Gwen caught her breath, and thought inexplicably of fire. Of the hiss of gas and raging flames, and smoke, which was not smoke, but was somehow thicker and more deadly and absolutely terrifying. Her breath caught in her throat and she looked uncomfortably away.

"So you found something then," Owen asked Jack's question for him. "One of these crazy rift devices the other Torchwood folks sent us will actually work."

"Weeellll," said the Doctor, drawing the word out, and rolling his eyes up to the ceiling in consideration, "I wouldn't go that far, but…" He turned back to his rapt audience, "Yeah, I think so. Probably yes. Almost positively. With about…oh…ummm…30 chance of error." The Doctor smiled insanely at the group. His enthusiasm, though hard to comprehend, was impossible to ignore.

Turning abruptly back to the bench, the Doctor grabbed the welding mask and, with a considering look at Owen, asked, "You good with your hands?" Owen, quiet for once, nodded affirmation. For all his bravado, he tended to be reserved about his own skills. "Can you handle a torch?" Owen paused, little lines of concentration appearing between his pinched eyebrows, then nodded again. "Good," the Doctor said, and tossed the mask at him.

Owen caught it one handed and considered it carefully. "So, what are we supposed to be doing, then?"

"Saving the universe," the Doctor replied, in an absolutely deadpan voice that was strangely at odds with the mischievous sparkle in his eyes.

"I'll need someone who's good with machines," the Doctor continued, glancing over at Tosh. Holding the device plan up in front of her, he asked, "Does this make any sense to you?" Tosh, taken aback for a moment, stared at him.

"Yes," she answered. "I mean sort of." She looked away, flustered. "It…I understand it in principle, but as for getting it to work…" Her voice trailed off in frustration. It was rare that Tosh couldn't figure out a piece of technology, even rarer for her to get called on it.

"Good enough for me," the Doctor enthused.

"Doctor," Martha piped up, glanced at Donna for confirmation, and said, "The two of us will help too. We've helped you enough with the TARDIS before; I think we know our way around a sonic screwdriver by now." The Doctor merely shook his head.

"The two of you, minus Donna's brief lapse into unconsciousness during tea, have been awake for a total of thirty-three hours, twenty-six minutes and counting. I wouldn't trust you to walk a straight line, let alone work with delicate machinery like this."

Martha seemed on the brink of protest, with Donna, if her fiery eyes were any indication, intending to back her up, when Gwen broke in.

"Jack, what about me?" She stepped forward, the ends of her dark hair swaying about her shoulders and her bottom lip sticking out slightly in an anticipatory pout. "What can I do to help?" Jack noted that she left Ianto out of her calculations, and felt poorly, as usual, for the way the team's resident non-expert in anything was always automatically left out of consideration for any delicate operation. It's not always beneficial to be the strong silent type.

"Gwen," he started, "You-"

Blaring alarms cut him off. Tosh's eyes went immediately wide, and she sprinted towards her work station. Oddly enough, Owen was the first to follow after her, frowning at her back in concern. The Doctor, far from rushing off to see what fresh new hell had arisen to plague the Torchwood team, turned back to the work bench and replaced the diagram on the corkboard behind it with its original tack. Almost immediately, he began sifting through the jumbled piles of discarded alien tech littering the table-top, picking each piece up and twirling it between his thumb and first finger in examination. Jack shook his head in derision, and followed his team.

Striding up to where they were huddled in a bunch before the row of screens, he slapped his hands absently against his thighs, causing the sweeping train of his great-coat to swing behind him and announcing his presence to the group. All but Tosh turned at the sound and he addressed them, "So, what've we got now?"

"Weevils," Owen supplied, "Lots of them."

"Define lots?"

"Define weevils," Donna added with confusion.

"Inarticulate alien rift divers," Ianto provided, and pointed to the screen which showed an overhead camera view of the nearly overcrowded cells. "Not very pretty," he added, "Or nice."

"As to lots," Tosh continued, typing maniacally, "Try more than ten."

"Seriously?!" Gwen's voice wavered with frightened incredulity, "Ten weevils? At once?! How are we supposed to bag and tag them all?"

"Actually," Tosh said unhelpfully, "It's more like twenty." A map popped open on the main screen before her showing little red dots blinking from all corners of Cardiff. As Jack watched, another red dot appeared where he didn't think one had been present before. He hoped it was just his mistake, that he had missed it previously when in mid-blink. "And growing," Tosh said, confirming Jack's worst fears.

"Shit." Owen's outburst sounded part in anger, part awe; and no one even looked sideways at him in correction. It was a thought they were all having at the moment.

"Gwen, Ianto," Jack listed. "Weapons and gear. I want you back up here and ready to ride in 2 minutes." The two immediately took off for the weapons lockers. "Tosh, you stay here with the Doctor. Getting that device of his built and working is out first priority." Tosh nodded, understanding. "Owen-"

Owen cut Jack off before he could be told what to do. "There's no way I'm staying here playing erector set while weevils are terrorizing my town." Jack glared at him in response, but couldn't come up with a good enough reason to dress him down. He was right, they were going to need all the firepower they could muster, and Owen, for all his skills with a knife and needle, had some not inconsiderable ability at kicking ass. Jack nodded his assent, and Owen took off after Gwen and Ianto to arm himself.

Martha and Donna had stepped off to the side and were having a quiet and hurried argument, likely about what they were going to do to help the situation. Jack had little doubt they would both argue their places were by the Doctor's side, aiding him in any way they could. And if that were not an option, Jack was willing to bet they would try to argue their way into weevil patrol duty, despite knowing nothing at all about the nature of weevils themselves. He was certain that, whatever job they put themselves to, they would keep at it until they collapsed with exhaustion. Unfortunately, that seemed to be a state that neither was far from attaining. He reached out a friendly hand to Martha's shoulder, and she broke off her whispered tirade to turn in his direction. "Hey," he said kindly, "Get some sleep." He saw her chin go hard with stubbornness, and kept his voice soft. "You're gonna need it." He nodded at Donna to indicate that he meant for her to rest as well, then turned back to the screen; a clear dismissal.

It took a few moments but, eventually, realizing the futility of any argument against the former time agent or the Doctor, the two stumbled off towards the TARDIS. Jack looked up as his team again gathered about him, locked and ready to roll. Pride mixing with apprehension in his gut, he gave his best impression of an encouraging smile.

"Let's get to work."


	9. Chapter 8

Martha entered the TARDIS kitchen to find Jack already ensconced at the small table with his feet propped up upon a second chair and a newspaper spread before him. He glanced up from his reading as she entered and passed a measuring gaze over her slightly rumpled morning appearance. She met his eyes unflinchingly, accepting his challenge. At least she had changed clothes. Jack looked to have slept in that heavy blue coat of his; which brought up the question of exactly where (or if) he had slept at all. Given that, the last she heard of it, the town supposedly under his protection was going to hell in a hand basket, Martha expected that he had been awake the whole time that she had been collapsed blissfully in her own bed. A mug at Jack's elbow drifted steam towards the TARDIS' cold, coral colored ceiling.

"That's never coffee," Martha asked hopefully.

"It is, in fact." Jack smiled. "Help yourself."

Crossing to the pot of liquid caffeine, Martha glanced at the headline blazed across the front of Jack's paper. CARDIFF UNDER SIEGE BY NUCLEAR MUTANT FREAKS. Oh, that couldn't be good. A smaller headline off to the side also caught her eye. PURPLE WEB FOOTED FISH FALL FROM SKY; LOCAL SCIENTISTS PUZZLED. Martha shook her head. At this rate, it looked as if Cardiff was going to need a super-sized hand basket. A used mug was already resting in the sink, awaiting someone motivated to wash it and put it away. Donna must already be up. Martha filled her own cup, decided to forego cream or sugar, and plopped down at the table across from the former time agent. Jack was staring intensely at one of the articles, a deep crease marring his otherwise baby smooth forehead.

"You know your face is going to stick like that," she admonished him. He looked up at her, surprised, then with a wry smile folded the paper closed and set it on the table.

"Sorry." He leaned back in his chair and stretched, the joints in his back popping audibly. He rubbed his eyes and pinched hard at the bridge of his nose. "It's been kind of a rough night."

"Nuclear mutant freaks?" Martha asked. Jack shook his head.

"No, weevils." He looked at Martha and seeing the question in her eyes, "It's debatable, however, which exactly would be worse." Martha nodded, sipping at her coffee.

"So you were up all night then?"

"Most of it," he said, closing his eyes tiredly and crossing his arms. "Usually, when they come through the rift you get one, maybe two, at a time. But last night." He shook his head sadly, painting a picture for himself of the previous evening's carnage on the backs of his eyelids. "Twenty, thirty," he sighed. "Tosh stopped counting. The cells were already full so we had to outsource the overflow to the police, the whole city is going into a collective apoplexy and apparently some idiot at the police station decided not to take our advice about not talking to the press." He opened his eyes and blinked at her. "The Doctor's been up all night, of course, working on that rift-dispersion thingy. Hasn't stopped for a breath, as far as I can see. I sent Tosh home for some rest about 5 this morning, she was dead on her feet. She tried to fight me on it until I told her she wasn't any use to us with her eyes too bloodshot to read rift wave patterns."

"Donna's up," he said more cheerfully, "Taking coffee to the troops."

Martha curled cold fingers about the comforting warmth of her own coffee mug and Jack could see there was something she wanted to talk to him about. Something that required her two companions to be decidedly out of the room. She opened her mouth to speak just as Donna entered the kitchen, an empty serving tray tucked under her arm. "Jack," she started, "There's some sort of flying, lizard thing outside flapping about the TARDIS and screeching up a storm."

"Oh, right," Jack said, gritting his teeth a tad sheepishly and picking up the folded newspaper from the table. "Pet pterodactyl. Probably time for his feeding."

He headed towards the door of the TARDIS, playfully bumping against Donna's shoulder on his way out. She smiled and swatted at him as he passed. "Git," she laughed.

Jack spun around to face both of them, his long coat swinging dramatically out behind him. He turned up both palms and shrugged. "You say that like it's a bad thing." Donna rolled her eyes and took his seat.

"Hey," he said, pointing at them, already half outside the door, "You two. Breakfast. I know this great place just around the corner. Like an American diner, only the coffee's drinkable. My treat."

Donna raised her eyebrows, and looked sideways at Martha. Martha turned a bemused look on Jack. "Won't that be a little hard…what with the mutant freaks and all?"

"Don't forget fish falling from the sky," Jack added cheerfully.

"Right," said Donna, "Sounds like a great time for a field trip."

"Come on," Jack cajoled, "Eggs, bacon…" The silence was deafening. "Pancakes?"

Donna face broke into a slow smile. "Thanks, I already ate."

"Ianto bring you something?" Jack asked knowingly. Donna's cheeks reddened in response. "Well, Martha what about you." He looked expectantly towards her."

Martha gave the flamboyant time agent a considering look. "Yeah, I'm game," she replied slowly.

"Then it's a date." Jack grinned, flashing his white, male-model straight teeth, and backing through the doorway.

"Well, that was unexpected," Donna said. Martha looked at her friend. "Fine as a summer day, that one. World coming down around his ankles and he's going courting." Martha shrugged. Yes, with Jack, there was always an ulterior motive, though she thought that this time love might not be his primary objective for his getting her alone. She had a strong suspicion that he would never seriously make advances at either Donna or herself; unless, of course, they were the ones to make the first move. Otherwise he'd see it as some sort of a betrayal of the Doctor's confidence. Besides, Jack was perfectly aware that she, at least, wasn't interested in him in the slightest. Well…Martha mentally amended…maybe just a little. You really couldn't help but admire Jack and his careless, boyish charms. Rather like the Doctor, really. Without all that complicated alien nonsense. No, whatever Jack's motives for buying her breakfast, sex was…for once anyways…off the menu. She was sure she'd find out the reasoning behind his mad desire to brave mutants and God knew what else for eggs and bacon soon enough. There was, however, one thing Martha wanted to know first.

"There's seriously a pterodactyl?"

/

A tiny hidden bell chimed shrilly as they entered the restaurant. Like an American diner there was a long counter on one side fronted by stools for the patrons and backed by a small kitchen area. There was also a selection of ubiquitous tables scattered throughout the open area and a handful of booths lined up against the back wall. The décor, however, was pure Cardiff; with ancient photos of cricket matches and framed copies of the local paper lining the walls. One such periodical shouted out to patrons that GERMANY SURRENDERS! Another, more recent copy, showed Millennium Centre at its dedication. Made by Torchwood, for Torchwood; though none but the Torchwood members themselves would ever know it.

Aside from a worried looking waitress wringing her hands behind the counter, and one older gentleman nursing a cup in a corner booth, the diner was empty.

"Quiet today," Jack noted as he strode over to the counter, "But I guess that's to be expected." The two of them perched upon stools and the waitress hurried over.

"Hello," she said, seeming distracted, "Is there something I can get for you?"

"Two orders of the number 3 and two coffees, please," Jack replied with an encouraging smile. Then, upon seeing Martha's suspicious look, "Trust me." Martha just shrugged and the waitress poured the coffee.

"So you wanted to talk."

Martha stared incredulously at Jack over the rim of her cup. "You're the one who asked me to breakfast."

"Yeah," Jack agreed, "But that's because I knew you wanted to ask me something."

"Wow," Martha sulked, slurping at her coffee, "Wasn't aware I was such a burden."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "You're not."

"Must be." She set her cup upon the counter with a clatter and stared out the windows to the empty, sunlit sidewalk beyond. "God knows I'm no use back at…at headquarters."

Jack appreciated her discretion. He sighed and, reaching a finger out to her chin, turned her head back to face him. "Hey, does it look like I'm doing anything particularly useful right now?"

"You were up all night-"

"And now that's done with." He dropped his hand to the counter. "For now anyways, and it's up to the tech-geeks to do their thing." He shook his head in annoyance. "And for that, we're both pretty much useless." He gave her an apologizing grin and explained further, "Give us a monster to subdue and we're ready for action, but as it is we'd just be hanging around the Doctor, asking questions about quantum whatevers that we really don't _want_ to know about, messing up Toshiko's file system, annoying the hell out of Owen, and tripping up Donna and Ianto as they compete to see who can bring the most tea to the most people fastest." They both smiled, imagining the scene Jack had painted.

The waitress stepped through the swinging door, two steaming plates in her hands. They were piled with artery clogging goodness, and Jack could feel his mouth water from across the room. With a pleasant 'Here you go', the waitress set the food before them and, with yet another worried glance out the windows, hurried away to refresh the old gentleman's coffee. Jack dug in with relish.

"This is what you eat?" Martha asked, incredulous; picking at a fried egg with her fork.

"Mmmmhhhmmmm." Jack smiled around his full maw.

"This stuff will kill you," she said in her best disapproving doctor's voice, while slicing into a thick sausage link.

Jack chewed quickly and swallowed. "Best thing about being immortal, you can eat pretty much anything you want." As if to prove his point, he picked up a fat riddled slice of bacon and ripped it in half with his teeth, then lifted his eyes to the heavens in evident rapture. Martha snorted. For some time afterwards the two were silent, enjoying their greasy repast, until, after Jack's attack upon his breakfast slowed to normal human speeds of consumption, Martha started in on the topic that had been filling her mind ever since their viewing of the various videos the night before.

"Jack," she started slowly, "Tell me about Rose."

Jack swallowed the remainder of his egg with a gulp, then looked at her sideways. "What do you want to know?"

"Oh, I don't know," Martha said, leaning back and crossing her arms. "Maybe this was a bad idea…" Jack looked at her patiently. "It's just…you knew her, right."

Jack set down his utensils and leaned against the counter. "As well as one person can know another, yes." Martha considered his face. He appeared serious, and that was necessary. She meant this line of questioning in all seriousness, and the last thing she wanted from him was a joke at her or the Doctor's (or even this Rose chick's) expense.

"You two were close, then?" Jack nodded and Martha hesitated to go on.

"Did you…did you love her?"

Jack appeared to consider the matter carefully. He closed his eyes and smiled sadly; reminiscing. Shaking his head he breathed out heavily before answering. "It was impossible _not_ to love Rose."

"How so?"

Still smiling wistfully, he continued with his explination. "I never knew anyone who met Rose Tyler who didn't fall madly in love with her inside of five minutes. She just had that effect on people. She never met anyone she didn't like, and everyone else just had to respond to her in kind. We could walk into a place-" Jack held his hands up, now, bracketing his point and getting into the story "-and this was in the old days when the Doctor wasn't quite as charming as he is now- we'd walk in and the whole place would be hostile. People at the bar shifting away from us, beers in hand. Scaly green things looking at us cross-eyed and suspicious. Then boom." Jack tipped his head confidentially towards Martha, "Ten minutes later and Rose would have the whole place buying us drinks, and everyone the best of mates. Hell, the girl made friends with a_ dalek_ once!"

"What, seriously?" Martha turned a shocked look on her friend.

"So the Doctor said," Jack nodded and smiled sadly. "I picked her up hanging off the painter of a zeppelin in Blitz-time London. She was wearing this shirt with the Union Jack splayed all over it, and we danced on air by the light of Big Ben." Martha's eyebrows shot into her hairline and Jack shrugged. "I never had a chance."

Martha nodded, and Jack tried to ignore the lost, contemplative look on her face. "So," she said slowly, "Did the Doctor…" Her courage failed her, and as her hope-stricken eyes turned towards him, Jack knew he had to be 100 honest.

"Yes," he said, answering her question before she could even fully articulate it. He watched impassively as her face fell. She had steeled herself against this unhappiness, had prepared herself for the answer she already knew was coming, but still could not entirely keep her disappointment out of her features.

"So…they were…" Martha seemed physically unable to say the word _lovers_.

"No," Jack shook his head emphatically. "It…it wasn't like that…nothing so…so overt as that…they never…I mean..." He struggled to find the words to explain a relationship he had never really been able to comprehend himself. He looked into Martha's dark, confused face and wondered how he could even begin to tell her.

At that moment, a memory flashed to the front of his mind. The past, England, and the three of them on a sweltering train to somewhere to do…something…he couldn't quite remember what…something about violent climate change and unnatural heat waves…it didn't matter. People were squeezed into the car like sardines, doing everything they could not to acknowledge their neighbors; though they couldn't quite escape the rancid mid-July sweat _smell_ of them. Eyes avoiding eyes. People on seats crouched as far away from one another as possible. Those standing, swaying with the motion of the train car; their grips upon the leather guide-loops slick with sweat.

The Doctor was standing next to Rose, with several uncomfortable people separating Jack from the pair of them. That was in the Doctor's black leather wearing days, and despite the heat, he hadn't bothered to shed his jacket. Rose herself was in a pink camisole covered over by a tight buttoned and curve enhancing jacket – a costume concession she had been forced to abide by because of the conventions of the decade. She was clearly suffering, wilting in the humid car, with one damp blonde lock having come loose from her braid and plastered itself to her cheek.

The Doctor turned towards Rose with concern written all over his craggy, angular face. His eyes that day were the deep blue of the Pacific…a color completely out of place with the locale and the temperature…but certainly more appropriate than the ice blue anger they sometimes flashed…or the violet terror. Jack watched silently as the Doctor slowly, and with extreme tenderness, reached out a single finger and tucked the errant strand delicately behind Rose's ear. Rose half turned at his touch, and met his gaze with a look that was neither thankful for his kindness nor amused at his presumption, but rather, perfectly encapsulated her absolute, abiding and unquestioning trust. Jack, with his not inconsiderable experience of the sensual universe, had rarely witnessed anything more erotic.

He blinked from his reverie into the dark brown eyes of Martha Jones. There were just some things that couldn't rightly be put into words.

"She was his," he said, amending after some consideration, "Well, everyone was his, you know how that goes." Martha listened in silence, her face a stone mask. "And….well…everyone was hers too" Jack reached out a comforting hand to the brave young doctor's forearm, "Including him."

Martha nodded with finality, resigned to the matter, and stuck her fork, with perhaps a little more force than was necessary, into her hash browns.


	10. Chapter 9

The heavy door swung outward and Jack and Martha strode laughing into the Torchwood foyer. Ianto stood beside the entry desk one hand to the little communication device virtually soldered into his ear. Upon seeing the dark look on the face of his friend and sometime lover, Jack cut his laughter short. It occurred to him that Ianto, being the sort who could get clingy with those he cared for, might not take kindly to his breakfast excursion with Doctor Martha Jones. He wasn't about to let that stop him, of course, but there was no reason to cause pain where none was necessary. He was about to say something, to reach out and include Ianto in their joke, when he realized that the Welshman had barely registered their entrance to the facility. With a grimace and a grunt of pain, Ianto ripped off his headset and held it at arms length.

"What the hell?!"

Jack had been just about to ask the same thing.

"Com trouble?" he asked instead.

"I keep getting interference," Ianto said, with a touch of frustration in his voice, and holding the earpiece and microphone combo out towards Jack. "I came up here to see if it was any better out of the hub, but I think it might actually be worse."

Jack took the device and turned it over in his hands. "Do you have it set to regular channels?"

"No, that's the damndest thing about it, it's on Torchwood 7." Jack blinked at him. That was a dedicated Torchwood channel. Nothing else ever broadcast at that frequency. Nothing on this world anyway.

"Well this can't be good," Jack commented ominously to Martha, as he inserted the transmitter into his own ear. His head was almost immediately filled with the buzzing pressure of white noise. Very loud white noise. Punctuated by piercing squeaks of feedback, and what sounded, to his ear anyways, almost like voices.

"Hello?" he asked cautiously. Then again louder, "Hello!" Jack was well aware that Martha and Ianto were bathing him with looks of amusement, but he kept up his query. He thought the voices, if they were voices, were stronger now. He could almost (but not quite) make them out. "If someone is using this channel, identify yourself."

Garbled sounds almost drowned out by the white noise, but definitely voices.

"I said identify yourself," he repeated more loudly, turning from his two companions and pacing towards the iron-reinforced entry to the underground complex.

"Grumble, garble mumble-ify yourself." Jack blinked. Was someone on the Torchwood team playing a practical joke? He wouldn't put it past Owen, or Gwen for that matter if she were given the chance, but this was neither the time nor the place for that kind of levity. He would have to give them a strict hard-assed boss talking to.

"Excuse me? Say again?"

"I SAID IDENTIFY YOURSELF." Jack flinched, and would have pulled the speaker from his ear, if it weren't so firmly ensconced therein. It sure didn't _sound_ like Owen, although the surly attitude fit like a glove.

"Look mister," he said heatedly, holding the mic close to his mouth and turning a baleful glance on no one in particular. "I don't know who you are, but this is an official Torchwood channel and you damn well better get off of it before the government comes down on your ass like a sledgehammer."

"Oh yeah, well this channel has been cleared except for emergency communications, so whoever you are, you better get off before the Acting Director hears you've been messing with protocol." Jack turned back towards Martha and Ianto with a surprised swish of his long coat. The two of them were leaning up against the desk, with equally comical wide eyed looks of concern for his sanity. He realized that they couldn't hear a word of what was going on in his earpiece, and that, to them anyway, he must appear like a madman shouting at the ether.

"Who is this?" Jack asked. Then with the voice of command he had learned so well during his years of military service, "Soldier, identify yourself."

The reply was considerably more quiet than the previous communication, as if the speaker was holding the mic far away from his mouth. "Foster, you bloody moron, give that com here." Squealing feedback followed, and then, "This is Mickey Smith, chief of security Torchwood Prime, and whoever this is you bloody well better have a good reason for messing with this channel. Now identify _your_self!"

Jack's mouth dropped open in shock and the sudden realization that things in his world, and apparently in another one as well, were about to change dramatically. Unconsciously, he stood straighter; staring with determined pride as he announced himself and his position.

"This is Captain Jack Harkness, head of Torchwood Three, Cardiff." And then, smiling slightly at the necessary amendment, "Alternate universe, I believe."

"Bloody Hell." The reply sounded as shocked as Jack felt. "Foster, find the Acting Director. Now!" The voice too, now, was unmistakable, even given the unfamiliar cadence of command. Even after years, and Jack's considerable practice at deciphering Londoners' heavy accents, the perpetually half-mumbled voice of Mickey Smith came to him through the earpiece nearly unintelligibly, from across a literally unimaginable distance. "Jack…" Mickey sounded awed, as if the situation was beyond belief…beyond his wildest dreams, "It's really you?"

"In the flesh!" he replied as cheerfully as he could manage, given the oddity of the situation. He was smiling uncontrollably, though, at Ianto and Martha. They both seemed to have realized that something weird was going on…well, aside from Jack shouting at himself…perhaps something "out of the ordinary" was a better way of putting it. Ianto had punched in the security access code and was opening the heavy door to the basement rooms, watching Jack's every move and listening attentively to the one sided conversation. Martha was standing expectantly, a hopeful look on her face and her hands clasped tightly before her.

"Mate," said the suddenly wavering voice from the other dimension, "We…we thought you were dead."

"Yes, well," Jack replied ruefully, "There's been a lot of that going around."

Mickey seemed to collect himself, then, and went on more forcefully. "Jack, you got our message, right?"

"We did in fact." Jack couldn't stop himself from smiling as he stepped through the doorway and headed downstairs.

"And the Doctor, Jack?" Mickey sounded almost desperate now. His voice was strained, as if he was trying to whisper in a room full of noise and still be heard. "You have to find the Doctor! Everything depends on him; everything!"

"One step ahead of you, old buddy," Jack assured him, "Holmes is already on the case."

"Oh, my God," Mickey said again, and this time Jack was given pause by the almost sniveling sound of relief that washed through the words. "Guys!" Though clear, Mickey's voice had gone quiet again. Jack could almost see him in his mind's eye, holding whatever communication device he was speaking into away from his mouth in order to address his comrades…whoever they were. "You gotta hear this!"

Suddenly, Jack found himself wondering for the first time where Rose was. He knew from experience that Mr. Mickey wouldn't be too far away from her, whatever the cost to himself.

"They found the Doctor! The folks on the other side, they've got him! And he's workin' on a fix to everything!"

At that moment the wireless was filled with a sound like that of waves as heard from beneath the surface of the ocean. It took Jack a moment to realize what it really was; and once he figured it out, it brought him up short so that Martha had to stop quick to avoid running into his back. What it was, was a mixture of cheering and weeping. Laughter through tears of joy and exhaustion. Delight amongst great sorrow, and vice versa. He had heard it before from the ranks of recently freed slaves, from innocents saved at the last possible moment from an unjustified execution, from the collective survivors of the Toclaphane invasion who had found one last good thing in this universe to believe in. Sounds from the throats of those who have nothing left to live for, but suddenly find themselves nursing a single candle's flame of hope. The sound welled in the distant microphone, and individual voices could start to be made out. Prayers of thanks from the still faithful. The more agnostic begging Mickey to tell them if it were really true. A keening wail of loss that seemed otherwise misplaced among the general din. Jack closed his eyes, shuddering, as if he could actually feel the teeming press of humanity on the other end of that tenuous connection. As if he could sense the unimaginable extent of their fear, and too, the blinding spark of their hope. As if, in that moment, he was right there with them.

Then he began to run.


	11. Chapter 10

"Doctor!" Jack shouted, rushing through the round bank vault door separating the main control room from the rest of the Torchwood complex and pounding across the grated walkways. "Doctor, you have to hear this!" He clattered up to Toshiko's station, ripping the com out of his ear, and began furiously to navigate the various access points of the internal PA system. Behind him, Ianto and Martha were just now running into the room, having been left in the considerable wake of his rapid departure.

"Doctor!" he shouted louder, drawing the word out so that his voice unavoidably cracked.

"Little busy right now, Jack," came the reply. Jack glanced up from his keyboard to the area of the room that had been cleared for construction purposes. The Doctor was kneeling on the floor in the middle of a self-created fallout of machine related detritus. In one hand he was holding the sonic screwdriver, blue and pulsing, while with the other he helped to steady the roughly football-shaped object that Tosh was cradling in her lap. All his concentration was fixed on a tiny unseen portion of the object, his retro glasses perched towards the very tip of his nose as he squinted down through them. Tosh, for her part, did nothing more than glance in Jack's general direction out of the corner of her eye, too terrified to move lest she upset the Doctor's careful ministrations.

"Doctor, I'm not kidding around here," Jack turned back to the computer. There, that should do it. Torchwood 7 should now be patched into the general PA. Jack reached over and flipped the switch to turn the speakers on. Ginning manically, he added, "We have first contact!"

White noise. Lots of it. Intermittent feedback. From across the room Jack saw the Doctor pause for a moment, the high pitched buzzing of the sonic screwdriver going momentarily silent. One contemplative eyebrow slowly raised itself beneath his bangs. "That's absolutely fascinating Jack," came the Doctor's voice, dripping with sarcasm. Then the eyes and hands returned to their business. The buzz of the sonic screwdriver started again.

"Damnit!" Jack grabbed the com. "Mickey? Hello? Is anyone there?" His voice came back to him through the loudspeakers, slightly delayed and more tinny than it sounded in his own ears. Jack's eyes searched desperately among the others in the room for assistance. Ianto and Martha had been joined by Donna and, given their shrugs and head shakes, the two were likely explaining that they were as much in the dark as she was. Owen had raised himself on one elbow from his place of collapse on the ratty futon upon Jack's noisy entrance, but since nothing more interesting seemed forthcoming, he flipped over to face the ther way, wrapped his arms about himself, and tried to return to sleep.

"Anyone?" Jack asked desperately. He could have been talking to the members of his team or to the faceless Torchwood members on the other end of the radio. White noise was the only sound that greeted him.

"What's up Jack?" Jack jumped and spun around. Gwen was standing not four steps behind him, a good 300 feet of orange extension cords looped about her arms and shoulders. She blinked patiently at his reaction.

"It's…the coms…I think," he gestured helplessly towards the computer terminal. Hundreds of years. Hundreds of lives. Traveled to the end of the universe and back. And for some goddamned reason he always, _always_ let Gwen Cooper get the drop on him. "I swear, someone was there," he explained both for Gwen's benefit and that of anyone else who was listening to his ramblings.

Gwen cocked her head and shifted the cords to a better position. "Well, what's that then?" she asked pointing at the screen. Jack looked. It was a bar graph of signal strength for all the dedicated Torchwood channels. He was about to explain this to Gwen, when he realized what the problem was. Torchwood 7 was reading at an all time low for signal strength. Jack's eyes widened as he attacked the keyboard, tossing a muttered 'Thanks' back at Gwen. Ianto joined them, Martha and Donna following a step behind. Ianto raised his eyebrows questioningly and got only a shrug from Gwen in return. Who knew why Jack ever did anything he did?

A great squeal of feedback burst throughout the control room, causing everyone there to momentarily cover their ears in pain. Everyone except Tosh, who got away with a flinch and a gasp, almost dropping the device the Doctor was working on, and the Doctor himself who only raised his head in annoyance. "Oi!," he said, "Trying to work here." Afterwards, silence spread throughout the room as the white noise and feedback collectively ceased. Those Torchwood members not currently holding the fate of humanity in their trembling hands looked up sheepishly from their half bent positions, and slowly removed their hands from where they were clasped to the sides of their heads.

Tentatively, Jack reached for the com once more. "Hello?" A pause. "Torchwood Prime?"

"Yeah Jack, we're still here. Thought we'd lost you for a bit there, mate. What happened?" The voice of Mickey Smith crackled over the Torchwood PA system. Jack's shoulders sagged with relief. Ianto and Gwen's eyes widened and they stared at each other. Donna clasped reflectively at Martha's forearm, and the dark skinned girl replied nervously in kind. Owen rolled back to face the front. From across the room, came the sound of clattering metal and a quick 'Whoops, sorry' as the Doctor leapt to his feet, accidentally kicking apart a pile of what looked liked discarded washing machine parts, got the sonic screwdriver caught momentarily in Toshiko's hair, and half ran-half stumbled across the metal floor panels to where Jack stood holding the com.

Jack had been about to reply before the Doctor had made a show of almost killing himself in his effort to cross the room. As the Doctor held his hand out expectantly for the microphone, Jack flashed his smuggest 'I told you so' look. He handed over the com.

"Mickey!" The Doctor exclaimed, spinning around in obvious excitement. For a moment there was no response from the other side. More questioning in his tone this time, the Doctor continued, "Mickey the-"

"Idiot, yeah." A slightly annoyed, vaguely amused voice whispered across the radio waves. "It's good to hear you too, Doctor."

"Well, I was going to say 'Mickey the Mildly Competent', but you can keep the old moniker if you like." Mickey barked a laugh.

"You certainly haven't changed any." His voice sounded at the same time relieved and infuriated. "Man. Rose's gonna flip when she hears we got ahold of you."

"She's alive?" The Doctor's face brightened momentarily, before descending into shadow again. "Mickey," he said, not a trace of the former hilarity in his voice, "How is she?"

"Well apart from the heat and the stress and us being under siege by raving lunatics, she's fine. We all are," he added, as if the rest of the world were an afterthought. Jack thought, from the Doctor's point of view, it probably was. The Doctor straightened.

"Under siege? From what?"

"Rebels." Mickey's voice oozed contempt. "Not the good _Star Wars_ kind either. They've got a beef with Torchwood because we…well, yeah…we did turn the sun into a red giant and all…so they have a point there…but it's not like we had a choice." This last was said with emphasis, as if Mickey was working hard to prove it to himself. "We were out of options, and all we could think of…well-" Mickey sighed dejectedly "All we could think of was you."

"So the earth is under siege?" The Doctor's whole face seemed to crinkle, as he struggled to make sense of the piecemeal story Mickey was relating. Or perhaps, Jack mused, it was creased with pain from having yet again found himself the underlying factor behind the destruction of an entire planet. _Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds_, indeed.

"Nah, just Torchwood. What's left of it. Torchwood Prime used to be the London branch, but we got ransacked…couldn't fight off the rebels…didn't want to fight them off really…they're just misguided citizens when it comes down to it." This was said in a voice that suggested Mickey had some ideas about how to reform the misguided. "All the branches got recalled and we ended up at the old Torchwood Delta complex because it's the most secure. Three stories below Cardiff with steel reinforced concrete walls who knows how many feet thick."

"Still, the Rebels followed us here. Don't know what good they think it's gonna do 'em. 'S not like it's gonna get them a transport berth any faster…anyways, they've got the whole place surrounded…send armed parties in every once and a while just to screw with us. We've only got the two main entrances, and they're both blocked. Torchwood Delta's almost impossible to breach, and a breeze to defend when it is, but it's also pretty much a death trap because if the entrances are blocked, there's really no way out."

"'Course Jack should know all about that sort of thing. Didn't he say he was head of Torchwood in Cardiff?"

Jack strode over until he was standing next to the brooding Time Lord. The Doctor was holding the com uselessly in his hand and staring at it as if it were some strange alien life form. "Yeah," Jack replied bending over, and speaking basically into the Doctor's palm. "Our Torchwood One was pretty much eliminated during the Canary Wharf incident. We're down to a little more than a dozen operatives worldwide; I've got five in my contingent."

Mickey swore. "What, only five of you?" He grunted in annoyance. "Gotta tell you that don't seem like enough manpower to figure out this rift stuff. Took our scientists months to come up with all that junk we sent on to you, and we've got a good hundred of them still on staff."

Jack looked up at the Doctor, expecting him to say something comforting then. To assure Mickey that he was working on a solution as they spoke. When the Doctor just continued to stare at his own hand as if he didn't even see it, Jack continued. "Yeah, well, it's not _just_ us. There's the Doctor, of course. He's worth a small army at least. And Martha and Donna are going to be joining us with their skills." He turned and winked encouragingly at the two girls.

"Martha and…who?" Mickey questioned, and seemed about to go on, but was interrupted by a collection of loud, stuttering pinging noises. Shouting could be heard over the speakers, and the sound of what was more identifiable as the return fire of laser weapons. The speakers again let loose a great squeal of feedback, and everyone this time covered their ears. Except the Doctor, whose eyes had suddenly gone wide with concern.

"Mickey," he shouted into the mouthpiece. The squealing stopped, replaced by the low thrum of static. "Mickey?!" The request for response was more desperate this time, though it was clear that no response was going to be forthcoming. Something had obviously happened on the other side. Something drastic. Jack just hoped they'd be able to get the connection back again before the end of the world…or worse. Looking at the Doctor's strained features, at the way he tangled one hand roughly in his hair, Jack could almost feel the frustration pulsing off of him in waves. With an inarticulate growl, the Doctor spun around. Murder or terror or desperate hope or all three burned across his features, he handed the mic roughly off to Jack, and stalked off to his former place amongst the nuts and bolts.


	12. Chapter 11

Donna, as it turned out, liked action movies.

She also liked jelly doughnuts, impressionist art and read _Pride and Prejudice_ once through every year.

Coincidentally, these were also among Ianto's favorite things.

They had managed to bond fairly quickly during the long walk to the pizza place, and during the even longer walk back, while precariously balancing large stacks of pizza boxes.

"So you hunt alien invaders?" She had asked once they were free of the dank Torchwood halls. "Sounds exciting."

"You travel the universe in a time machine," he had answered, "Who am I to brag."

"Yeah, but," and here she had turned an absolutely beaming smile upon him, "You can still step out for pizza whenever you want." Things had progressed well from there. By the time they had made it to the pizza parlor, dodging only one yellow ribboned police cordon and several dead purple colored fish along the way, they had established certain basic foundations.

Yes, Ianto fought aliens. No he did not fight good aliens. Generally he tried to help those. Yes, it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference.

Yes, Donna had traveled the universe. And in time. Yes, it was exciting, but it was also always cold…or hot…or something uncomfortable.

Yes, Ianto was with…_someone_…but it was complicated…and impermanent.

No, Donna was not _with_ the Doctor. They were just mates. Martha? Well that was another story…and complicated as well. No she and Martha weren't…umm…no…it wasn't _that_ complicated.

While they were waiting for the pizza - a considerable amount of time, given the fact that they had ordered 10 of them, and all with specialty toppings- they learned a bit more.

Donna had lived in London. She had met the Doctor when her work was taken over by a giant cockroach and she had been beamed up to the TARDIS from the middle of her own wedding. Yes, that had been a tad awkward. No, she hadn't gotten married. It wouldn't have worked out. Plus her fiancé was dead…and something of a scumbag.

Ianto had also lived in London and worked for Torchwood with his own fiancé at the Canary Warf facility. The place had been overrun by cybermen and…well, it wasn't pretty. No, she was dead too. No it…he didn't like to talk about it, if that was all right.

Donna knew about Canary Warf. She had looked it up on the internet because the Doctor had mentioned it once. No, she'd been on holiday at the time. She was sorry for his loss.

It was all right. Ianto was used to it. Not over it, mind you, just…the ache was less now.

No, Donna agreed, you never really got over it, but…

On the way back to Torchwood, they really got down to the nitty-gritty.

Sure, fighting aliens and the like was great, but Ianto sometimes felt as if the rest of the team never even saw him. Like he was just their cleaning service and tea boy. Sometimes the man behind the curtain was just a janitor.

Donna knew how he felt. It was hard, day in and day out, always being the go-to person. Always ready with a shoulder to cry on, a conscience to cling to, a mug of tea to share. But did anyone ever wonder about her fears? Her needs?

But it was worth it. Even without the thanks. Even without the fanfare or the recognition. It was worth it to really be part of something bigger than yourself.

Definitely.

By the time they stepped through the round vault door into the main Torchwood area, what had started out as light banter and friendly smiles had metamorphosed into sly, sideways glances and lightly blushing cheeks. It had been a rare chance for the two of them to relax. A rare moment without the constant press of their friends' cares and concerns. A moment to just focus on themselves; on each other. The satisfaction of a job efficiently done, only this time with company.

The mood was immediately broken up upon their entrance by the protracted shouting match in progress.

"I'm telling you Jack, it's a waste of resources!"

"No it's not. Owen's not doing anything right now anyways, he can take the time…do his own research … he's got the preliminary bioscans mapped out already and -" Owen stood somewhat nervously beside Jack, a messy stack of computer print-outs in his hands. The Doctor with the football shaped device tucked under one arm stood stubbornly before the two, a clouded look in his dark eyes.

"Uh, oh," Donna muttered under her breath.

"That's not what I mean, Jack." He spread his free arm out to indicate the whole of the control room. "Where are you going to get the power for it?"

The time agent folded his arms aggressively in front of him. "From the rift," he said, with a flippant toss of his head. The Doctor rolled his eyes dramatically.

"Great. Wonderful. Take power from the rift to toggle realities and bring stuff across, sounds like a great plan. Oh, wait," his eyes were blazing now, "Torchwood already tried that once…got them pretty much destroyed didn't it." Jack grimaced.

"This isn't like that, this is about saving-" Jack clenched his fists, anger creasing his brow. He looked about to say something else, but checked himself at the last possible moment. Changing tactics, he started again, "You use rift energy all the time. Siphoning it off to power the TARDIS."

"Yes," the Doctor was really getting into it now. Donna had rarely seen him quite this put out. "And I need that energy right now for saving the universe, which if you've possibly forgotten, is about to be collapsed into non-existence!" The former Time Agent and the Time Lord stared hard at one another. The air fairly crackled with energy. The public address speakers, did so audibly.

"Hello, is anybody there?"

Everybody jumped at the voice over the PA, especially the Doctor and Jack. Slowly and in unison, their two heads swiveled towards the nearest speaker as if pulled by the same string.

"Is this thing working? Hello?" A flat sound echoed through the towering chamber; someone tapping on a microphone to test it. Jack turned to look at the Doctor. He seemed frozen in place, stiff limbed and attentive, not unlike a dog on point. As Jack watched, the Doctor's lids slid slowly over his eyes and his shoulders drooped (only slightly, as if some muscle or other wrenched tight for a very long time had been eased into looseness). Then, and if Jack was ever asked he would have denied it, would have told anyone that he couldn't be sure, that it was an emotional moment and he really couldn't trust his own eyes, the Doctor shuddered. It wasn't the uncontrolled shaking of intense cold, nor was it the quivering shoulders of dread prickling down one's spine, but rather it was a subtle vibrating of his whole body - as if the Doctor were a violin string, just barely plucked, and coming to rest in tune. The soft brown tendrils of hair arcing over the Doctor's forehead trembled, then came to rest almost immediately, and the Doctor blinked his eyes open, looking for all the world as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Jack held his chin determinedly in its proper place.

"Look, if anyone can hear me, this is Rose Tyler Jones, Acting Director Torchwood Prime. I'm trying to reach the head of Torchwood…umm…Three, wasn't it?" Jack recovered first, blinking at the name which did and did not match the voice he knew so well, and strode purposefully towards the computer station which, for the time being, had been given over to command of communications with the other universe. Picking up the com device, he gave a moment's consideration as to how he should address someone who was his apparent opposite in rank and distinction in another universe, someone who also happened to be a rather attractive young lady for whom he had once (Once? Right, who was he kidding?) had a_ thing_, someone who just happened to be one of his best friends…who hadn't spoken to him in years…and very likely thought him dead the entire time.

"Hello sweet-cheeks."

"My God Jack!" Rose sobbed aloud, and Jack found his own eyes watering in response. "When Mickey told me I…I couldn't really believe…there's been so much death…so many friends lost…" Her voice trailed off with a gasp of barely held in tears. Jack tipped his head skywards to the great vaulting roof of the Torchwood complex, and let the burning droplets simmer in his bottom lids, rather than drip track-like down his cheeks. It wasn't the talking to her, even like this with no way to really see or touch each other, that got to him. This he had expected from the moment he had recognized Mr. Mickey's voice. It wasn't even her tears, tears for him…for what she had thought happened to him…for her happiness in knowing he was still alive…for all the others they had loved and who had fallen in battle. No, it was hearing the absolute loss in her voice. The complete and utter hopelessness that colored every phrase. The notes of despair making a mockery of her normally bright and harmonious voice.

Jack didn't want know what could make Rose Tyler suffer like that. What could make the person who had been his rock, and the Doctor's too at times, their one glowing beacon of hope during even the darkest moments of their friendship, sound so weak and beaten. If he hadn't been certain before that moment, he was now. Come hell or high water, he would get Rose Tyler (Jones? What was that about?) out of this mess. Somehow.

Trying to find some escape from unmanning himself in front of those males he most wished to impress, Jack took refuge, as he so often did, in humor. "It's really me sweetie. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated." Across the span of universes, Rose Tyler snorted with laughter; a sound that, despite the fact that it sounded harsher and more forced than he remembered (Rose's laugh had always been free and raucous hadn't it?) bubbled through his emotions like almost nothing else could and Jack finally felt safe enough to bring his eyes down from the ceiling. He found himself eye to eye with the Doctor, who had advanced on silent footsteps across the room during Jack's short conversation.

Jack had never seen him look like this.

Back when the Doctor's eyes had been blue, Jack had thought he knew them in all their myriad permutations. Poets often liked to talk about their lovers' eyes changing color like the sea, or like shadows over a forest pond, or whatever. It was all poetic bullshit, because absent contact intervention, human irises just did not change color. Time Lords' eyes, however, Jack had found, did. And in times before, he had been able to read the Doctor like a book based entirely on the way his eyes looked on any given day. The lighter the blue, the more trouble someone was going to be in when the Doctor got his hands on them. Purple meant that they- meaning the Doctor, Rose and himself- were in for some rough waters. On occasion the Doctor's eyes would even dip into a lighthearted sea-foam green. Those had been the best of times.

The transfer to brown in the Doctor's more recent body had been a bit of a disconcerting change. Jack hadn't gotten to spend nearly enough time with the Doctor in his current form to have worked out a definitive emotional color-wheel, as of yet. The Doctor's eyes were darker altogether now, trending to black, especially when he was getting ticked off at someone. But in this particular instance, they were brown. Jack decided, after a moment's contemplation, that they were coffee ground colored. Dark, yes, but warm; and a striking contrast to the almost-but-not-quite-ginger fringe of hair that framed them. And soft. That was the kicker. Velveteen and satin and silk, looking out at you from a face that had witnessed, with barely a crease to mar it, the destruction of galaxies.

"Jack," Rose's voice was considerably more composed now, the practical Torchwood operative in her taking over, "Mickey said…he said you'd found the Doctor, too…that he was helping you…" At the sound of his name, the Doctor's head lifted slightly, and without him having to hold out his hand and request it this time, Jack silently passed over the microphone. The Doctor looked down at the tiny device in his hand, his brow creased, almost as if he didn't know what to do with it. Concerned now, Rose's voice came again, "Jack? You still there?"

"I'm here Rose," the Doctor said.

In the silence that followed, you could have heard a pin drop anywhere in the main area; heard the echo of it spiraling upwards with the central column to bounce needlessly about the rafters.

"Hello Doctor," came the eventual reply. There was no sobbing this time. No exultant joy either. Instead, Rose went on with her conversation in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had just stepped out of the TARDIS five minutes earlier. "Never thought I'd get to hear your voice again."

"Same here." The Doctor, too, was talking as if reading a teleprompter. As if he were an actor playing his own part while blocking a scene, but not really into it. This was just…odd.

"Guess I kind of screwed things up this time, didn't I?"

"Eh, not your fault." The Doctor started pacing lightly then, back and forth in front of the com station. "Well, the sun maybe," he amended, "But that's not so bad."

"Yeah, cause you blow up a star every day."

"Well….not _every_ day," He said. Although he was facing away, Jack could hear the ghost of a smile in his friend's voice. Were the two of them actually bantering? About stellar destruction?! Jack had spent enough time with the two of them to become familiar with their habits of constant teasing. It had always been lighthearted, affectionate. Now it was neither of those things. As if they couldn't bring themselves anywhere near those emotions anymore and were taking refuge in the mere words themselves. As if it would make this whole thing easier. "It was a good idea though."

"Right, cause you thought of it first." This time, Jack could definitely hear the smile in Rose's retort. It was almost as though she were right next to him. Leaning impatiently against the computer desk with her arms defiantly crossed, and rolling her eyes at the egotistical Time Lord.

"Yeah, a bit. But really, nice work with all the research files."

"Oh," Rose asked with interest. "Have the proposed rift closing device plans been of any help? Have you been able to make anything out of them?" There was real anxiety now.

"Yeah, some of them are," the Doctor breathed in heavily through his nose while looking for a phrase that fit, "Not completely moronic."

"That's good to hear."

The Doctor ranged up next to Jack then, setting the 'football' down and half leaned – half sat upon the com desk next to him. The two of them were positioned so close together that were almost touching shoulders, and Jack got the feeling the Doctor didn't even see him there. "We've been working off this one plan. It's ah…" The Doctor's eyes closed in momentary thought. "Model C-165-ts". The Doctor then glanced over at Toshiko, who looked startled for a moment and then, checking the drawings in front of her, nodded back.

"Well, I'll see if we still have the creator on base here. Maybe they can be of some help."

"Couldn't hurt," the Doctor added unhelpfully. Mercilessly. Emotionlessly. This was about to start driving Jack stark-raving mad.

"All right then," Rose said. Concise. Sterile. Clipped. What the hell was going on? "I…uhhh….I have some duties to attend to. But, we'll keep the com open, and I promise to update you as soon as I have any information on the designer."

"Sounds good." The Doctor stood then and, with no ceremony whatsoever, handed the mic device back to Jack. Turning towards his exile corner of metal chaos, and grabbing the football, he stalked off in silence.

Jack stood there for a moment utterly stunned, before he caught himself and lifted the mic to his own lips-

"Rose…Rose are you still there?"

A pause, then Mickey Smith, "Sorry mate, she took off."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." There was something strained in his manner too, as if he was just as surprised by the cold conversation between their two friends. As if he felt a need to explain it, at least Rose's half, that is. "There's…well….we lost some people today…during the most recent Rebel incursion."

"The Acting Director's got to see about taking care of the bodies."


	13. Chapter 12

"What the hell was that?!"

Jack had waited patiently. Had tried to force down the pizza that Ianto and Donna had carried in, burning his tongue in the process. All the time, he had been standing; watching the Time Lord from the bay windows of the conference room. Watching him bent studiously over that stupid, heartless device like it was some sick infant; while the Torchwood team and the TARDIS crew joked and laughed and shared pizza slices behind him. He swore the alien never even blinked.

Eventually, the Doctor had gotten up, leaving his precious football behind, and crossed the room to Jack's office; disappearing behind the door of the TARDIS. Jack couldn't take it any longer, and with a final glance towards the empty seated com table, tossed his paper plate onto the long conference table and followed the Time Lord into his own domain.

"What the hell was what, exactly?" the Doctor asked, blithely unaware of (or in complete indifference to) Jack's barely controlled fury.

"What was that with Rose back there? Over the radio?! Damnit Doctor, you could have been talking to a stranger for all I could tell."

"And your point being?" If there had been anything that moment in the vicinity of Jack's reach, he would have thrown it at the Doctor.

"That she's _not_ just some stranger?!" Jack's voice was rising, out of his control. He tried to keep it's tone deep and modulated, not the high pitched squeak it could rise to when he really let go (as he was about to at any moment). "That she's your friend. _My _friend. One of the best friends either of us have ever had and you just tossed her off like she was nothing." The Doctor's eyes met Jack's steadily. They were still that coffee brown. Still soft, but now with a hard dark line around the edge of color. Jack swung around angrily, not wanting to spend another moment looking into that smug, superior Time Lord visage. He continued railing against him, though, his voice dripping with contempt. "This could be the last chance you ever get to say anything to her, and you treat her like the sales girl at Harrick's. Well, I guess that's not a surprise."

"And just what exactly, Jack, would you have me say?"

Jack spun back around violently. "Oh, I don't know. How about that you're happy she's alive and not cooked to death on some alternate earth?" Jack took one slow, predatory step towards the Doctor. "How about that you're sorry you got her stuck there in the first place? Sorry you ever suggested that blowing up the sun might be a good way to phone home?" Jack continued his dangerous advance, and the Doctor continued to appraise him impassively from where he leaned against the TARDIS controls. "How about that you'll fix everything? That you'll come through and save the day just like you always do? That everybody's going to live this time, Doctor; why won't you tell her that?"

"Because I can't Jack." And Jack was close enough to him now to see the change in his eyes. The smooth brown eaten up by blackness in an instant; sucked away as if by a massive whirlpool. No, a black hole. It made Jack shiver. "I can't save everybody. Not this time."

Jack felt his anger dissipate slightly at the Doctor's admission. "You can't hold yourself responsible for what happened to…to those people in the alternate Torchwood. You're doing everything you can to save their universe, isn't that enough?"

The Doctor chuckled then, morosely, a sound like earth turning over in a grave. "No, Jack. I mean I can't save any of them. Not a single one." Dark eyes pierced like laser beams into Jack's soul and a sudden pain clenched about his heart. Suddenly, he found himself almost without the breath to continue.

"What?"

The Doctor took on his best lecturing tone. "The device I've been working on is based on a principle of strengthening rift boundaries currently in place. As such, the best we can hope for it is to return the rift to the _status quo_ which existed before the Hole started opening up. Still, given the time we have remaining, it's the only thing we'll even have a chance of completing before the clock runs out. So for now, it's the best chance this universe has of shoring up the recent breaches on our side of the rift."

"So it gives us more time," Jack prompted, "I get that. At this point I'll take _status quo_."

"Right," said the Doctor nodding. "The problem is it takes a tremendous amount of energy to power- which as I pointed out earlier, we'll need to use the rift for. More importantly, it takes a converter that can handle that kind of massive energy surge."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "And?"

The Doctor spread his hand out palm upwards, indicating the curved walls of the TARDIS arching around them. "Look around you Jack, most powerful energy converting device in the universe." He smiled fondly then, "And there's only one like her."

Jack was about to question further, when he stopped himself. Oh, God. Only one in the universe. Fucking unique. Beautiful and powerful and unknowable; time flowing through her bowels like a stream through a forest. A priceless masterpiece. Nothing like her anywhere in all of space and time.

And certainly nothing like her in the other universe.

"Pete's Universe is doomed Jack. Has been since the Hole first poked through on their side. And there's absolutely nothing I can do to save them."

Jack flew back from the Time Lord in shock. Backed away from the realization. Backed away from the deadpan delivery with which the Doctor had given eulogy to an entire universe of souls. Backed away shaking his head in denial, until his shoulders hit a support column and he stopped. Jack closed his eyes. He could feel himself shaking all over, though whether from rage or fear or just plain adrenaline, he couldn't tell. "So that's it then," his voice came out as a croak, "No more Pete's World, no more alternate Torchwood…" He opened red eyes and stared at the Doctor.

"No more Rose."

The Doctor was silent, and really, what more was there to say?

"Doctor," Jack started heatedly, his breaths coming in quick little gulps, "We've got to bring her across. Bring as many people over as we can while there's still time. I told you Owen thought he could work out a way of locking on to biological signatures through the intra-universe connection we have going. If we just-"

"No Jack," the Doctor's voice was cold, and tinged with annoyance at having to explain this to him again, "It would take up too many resources to attempt something like that." He shook his head sadly. "We need every ounce of energy we can get to ensure the device does its work on our side of the rift."

"But it's worth a chance," Jack said, his voice rising again out of control, "Isn't it worth the risk to try and save someone…anyone…" The Doctor looked at him, knowing what he would say next. "Rose."

The Doctor contemplated the human before him for a moment before continuing. "You'd risk the entire universe to save the life of one girl?"

"You wouldn't?" Jack challenged.

The Doctor shook his head, "I can't."

"Well, why the hell not?!" Jack demanded.

"My whole species gave itself up to save the universe, and there wasn't anything I could do for them either. The brightest minds the universe has ever known. The deepest poets, the most brilliant engineers…" The Doctor drifted off, then, lost in his own memories. "All burned to ash. Threw themselves on the pyre; all because, ultimately, they were the keepers of the universe. They were the nursemaids to all of creation, and keeping it safe was their one and only priority." The Doctor glanced meaningfully up at Jack through his scattered bangs. "And you expect me to risk it all on a 21st Century shop-girl from a level 5 planet."

"I'm sorry," Jack replied quietly, too angry anymore even to shout. Rather, he continued to shake, but with certainty now that it was rage. "I was working under the impression that you loved her." The Doctor's head snapped up towards Jack. "I see now that I was mistaken." Still shaking, Jack swung about and headed for the TARDIS doors.

"Jack," the Doctor called after his retreating form, and something in the Doctor's voice brought the former time agent to a halt. "What's it like when you die?"

Jack's head popped up. "Is that supposed to be a threat?"

"No." Jack looked back over his shoulder. The Doctor was still leaning against the TARDIS console, looking evenly back at him. "Just a question."

"There's pain and everything goes black and then I'm awake again with a terrible headache."

"But you're still you." Jack's eyes narrowed. Just what was the Doctor trying to get at? "As soon as you're awake. Same memories. Same feelings. Same man." Jack nodded and turned back around. The Doctor folded his arms and continued. "But what if it wasn't like that? What if you did change? What if you woke up with absolutely no idea who you are, and only the vaguest inkling of the person you used to be?" Jack thought he was beginning to see where the Doctor's logic was leading, and though he wasn't at all sure what it had to do with their original argument, he was willing to listen and try to understand. He had enough trust in the Doctor, enough trust in his own prior assessment of the Doctor, to give him the benefit of the doubt. "New face. New way of thinking. New sights and sounds and tastes and experiences. And the world spinning and time whirling and the universe needing without a doubt for you to be someone you don't even really remember anymore." The Doctor stopped then, waiting for a response from Jack.

"That would be," Jack gave it a moment's thought, "Absolutely terrifying." The Doctor nodded acknowledgement.

"Now let's add another factor to the equation; you wake up and there's somebody else there with you. Your little Gwyneth, for example," the Doctor smiled slightly, "Who seems bound and determined to follow your lead to the ends of the earth and back." Jack's eyes narrowed at that last comment. The Doctor uncrossed his arms and leaned back, gripping the edge of the console and staring at the TARDIS ceiling as if he could actually picture the scene he was imagining plastered there in fresco. "And she's terrified. Terrified for you, terrified _of _you, and she's staring at you with those big eyes of hers like she's never seen you before. And you're seeing her differently, as if for the first time, but really it's not, because you remember her from before. Oh yes, her you remember very clearly." The Doctor's eyes closed, and his face took on a different appearance. What few lines had been etched into its surface from its relatively few years of considerably hard use, seemed to smooth themselves. And though Jack knew it must be some trick of the light, he looked, momentarily, years- no ages- younger.

"You favorite color and the taste of strawberries and where you put your keys last all gone. All unessential, but she burns in your memory as clear as day. And it's not just the sight of her, but the scent as well. Her own soft naked scent buried beneath everything she uses to try and cover it up in her so very naive way, and the feel of her skin like silk beneath your own. And you know, just know, that only moments before you were touching that skin, feeling the hot pulse of life rushing just beneath the surface. Running fingers through hair that flowed like sunlit water between them. And taste-" the Doctor's eyes squinted behind their lids and a strange soft sound emerged from behind hastily closed lips. "You can actually taste her still, on the back of teeth that are too sharp and too straight and otherwise completely foreign. And she's calling to you with fear in her voice, and it's all so goddamned familiar; not just the voice, but the fear in it too."

The Doctor opened his eyes, looking straight into Jack's own, and they are coffee brown again, and satin soft, but this time there is a fist of iron behind the supple exterior. Kid gloves forced over something hard, and immovable, and very, very dangerous. The Doctor continued in a voice that was just as dark and smooth and scary as the gaze he bathed Jack in. "And you know just one thing in all the universe that is true. Only one bit of reality you can put your finger on and follow like a compass heading."

"That you would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep her safe and happy, and to make her smile."

Jack gulped, his mouth having gone dry, and took a single step back towards the Time Lord.

"If that's true," Jack recognized the insufficiency of his meager words for this question, but went on anyways. "If that's really how you…" The Doctor stared silently back at him, some of the stone melting from his gaze.

"Then how can you just sit there and do nothing while she gets ripped apart along with her whole existence?"

"Because I have to Jack," he explained patiently, shrugging. "Because it's what Rose would have wanted. Because the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up universe. Because tomorrow some little kid will play kickball in the streets of Cardiff, then grow up to have kids of his own, who will have kids of their own, who will have millions upon millions of descendants, who will fly to other worlds in distant galaxies and have children with anthropomorphic cats in extraneous headgear, and somewhere, someday, on one of those planets, Rose Tyler will lay on a hill of blue-green clover and watch hover-cars flutter about a giant city towering into a purple sky, and laugh with pure joy at the sight of it all."

The Doctor shook his head a final time, "I can't save the other universe Jack; all I can do is protect what's left of her here."


	14. Chapter 13

"So, tell us what you know about Jack?"

Martha blinked in surprise at Tosh's forward line of questioning. "Me? You guys see him every day."

"Yeah, but that's work in' it," Owen continued. "The guy's as tight lipped as can be about anything outside of Torchwood. Anything from his past for instance." Owen raised his eyebrows meaningfully at his companions, as if to say 'You guys know what I mean'.

"I don't know what I could tell you."

"Well," Tosh said, setting aside her wine glass, "You could at least offer your insights into the great gay-or-straight debate."

"Gay," Owen shouted immediately.

"Not necessarily," Tosh countered quickly.

"God, not this again," moaned Ianto.

"What?" Tosh asked innocently, "Is it so wrong to be curious about a co-worker's life?"

"They did this to me too," Gwen confided, rolling her eyes, "My first day."

"Well he did sorta make a pass at me earlier on," Donna noted.

Tosh simpered, "See."

"I wanna hear Ianto's opinion," Owen said darkly, glancing at the man in the prim suit sitting at the head of the table. Ianto glared back.

"No comment."

"I did see him flirt with an alien once." Five heads at the table snapped towards Martha.

"Male alien or female alien?" Owen asked.

"Ummm...female…I think."

The four Torchwood members leaned back in their chairs pondering. Then Gwen laughed aloud and shook her head. "Listen to us! You'd think all we ever do is talk about sex." Owen looked about ready to add a nasty comment, but Gwen stopped him with a look. "Believe it or not, we actually are more interested in tracking down Jack's mysterious origins."

"So spill," she said, leaning eagerly over the table with a conspiratorial smile. "How'd yah meet our Captain Jack?"

Martha blushed slightly at having the attention of the entire Torchwood team focused on her, but she'd had some practice at storytelling by now and had rather grown to like it. She started off telling them about her and the Doctor's accidental trip to the end of the universe, with Jack clinging to the side of the Tardis like a lemur; about the sweet, ingenious Doctor Yana (who it turned out was someone else entirely); about escaping home to the 21st century and finding Harold Saxon elected Prime Minister.

"Yeah," Owen broke in, "Whatever happened to that guy?"

"Ummm…" Martha squirmed uncomfortably in her seat.

"Don't bother," Donna interjected, "She always stops right there. They both do. Don't like to talk about it for some reason."

"All right then," Gwen acceded. "Still, sounds more fun than trudging through ankle deep snow in the Himalayas chasing extra-terrestrial Yeti rumors." The Torchwood team nodded and murmured their agreement.

"How long are they going to stay in there?" asked Ianto, whose attention, throughout Martha's story, had been firmly fixed on the blue box still visible through the windows to Jack's office. "I mean, what on earth could they be getting up to in there anyway?" He said this last sounding very much like a man who knew exactly what Jack and the Doctor could be getting up to inside a phone-booth sized box.

"It's bigger on the inside," Martha explained simply.

"What?"

"It's big-…never mind. Show you later." Martha was saved from further explanations by Jack exiting the TARDIS. His look had been close to murderous when he entered, now it seemed…contemplative. With a halting stride and hooded eyes, Jack made his way over to the com station, perched on the desk, planted his feet on the chair, and picked up the mic.

"Anybody there?"

"Still here Jack," the voice of the strange man none of them had ever met- or ever was likely to meet, given the current situation- rumbled throughout the Torchwood complex. "You got something?" he asked, anticipation clear in his voice.

"That Mr. Mickey again? No, not yet. Just wondering how things are going on in the alternaverse." Jack leaned back and glanced up at the conference room where his team was very studiously pretending not to pay attention to the conversation.

Mickey started listing off the various insurmountable problems the Torchwood of his universe was currently dealing with, as if ticking them off on his fingers. "Hole still open and getting bigger; sun, coincidentally, not getting any smaller; air conditioning broke so we're working with an internal temperature of about 96 degrees in most of the lower floors; armed rebels surrounding the building on three sides; central government all but collapsed; oh, and we've started to get reports from across the city that weirdo, flat nosed, aggressive alien things have started appearing everywhere and wreaking havoc...so basically things are peachy."

Jack thrust the palms of his hands into his eyes and rubbed the tiredness from them. He didn't want to hear this. Why was he even asking? It wouldn't make him feel any better and it certainly wasn't going to help the poor saps on the other side of the rift either. All it could accomplish was making him more miserable than he already was.

'Maybe I deserve it,' the thought popped unbidden into his mind. Jack shook his head violently to clear his thoughts. "Hold on a second, you've got rebels at your door and a city brimming with weevils, what are you doing talking to me? I mean, what's the chief of security doing just sitting there next to the line like some love-sick teenager waiting for us to call."

"Actually, I'm on security detail." There was a smile in the voice, "Acting Director has declared protection of the open channel Torchwood Priority One. So I'm sitting here in the most secure room in the whole building with no less than three guards covering the door with heavy weaponry."

"Acting Director," Jack repeated slowly, as if trying the title out. "Why the 'acting'?"

"Cause here the Prime Minister calls all the shots and is the official Torchwood Director."

"And he's not still around?" Jack was surprised the English Prime Minister would have been such a pansy to flee the planet peremptorily.

"_She's_ MIA at the moment, a lot of people are. Presumed candidate for cyberization. Hence the 'acting' part."

"Oh," said Jack, not sure exactly how to follow up a statement like that. "And the Jones?"

"The what?"

"Rose Tyler _Jones_."

Mickey laughed aloud. "You're a trip mate. World coming to an end and you're wonderin' whether Rose's still single."

"Sorry, one track mind." Jack grimaced.

"Nah, it's just a made up name. No one here was gonna believe that Pete and Jackie Tyler had a twenty-something daughter just pop out of the woodwork. We needed to make a new identity for her, right? And Rose chooses 'Jones' because of Harriet."

Surprise flashed across Jack's face. "The former Prime Minister?"

"Yeah!" Mickey laughed again. "Rose got blown up with her in Downing Street once. Been keen on her ever since. Too bad she turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, what with shooting down the Sycorax after they gave up and all."

Jack coughed. Torchwood had a little something to do with that travesty, too. "Well, we've had worse since then." Frowning he glanced towards the far side of the room, where the Doctor had again ensconced himself among screws and ball bearings, looking like he was not paying one iota of attention to the conversation being boomed over the loudspeakers. Jack, however, wasn't fooled for a moment by the Time Lord's apparent harmlessness. "You can trust me on that one."

"And speak of the Devil…" A sharp mechanical squeak preceded Rose's voice over the loudspeakers.

"Jack, we found the designer."


	15. Chapter 14

From behind Jack came a loud thump, followed almost immediately by a deafening crash. Though he didn't turn around to confirm it, Jack highly suspected that the Doctor had just jumped in surprise, smacked his head against the low workbench, and knocked half its contents to the floor. He hoped nothing important had been destroyed in the process, but even if it had, he would not have been able to stop from smiling at the ensuing muttered swearing if he tried. Rather, he beamed up at his team and the TARDIS crew as they began descending single file from the conference room.

"Oh?" Jack asked the com, interested. Then calling over his shoulder, "Doc, it's for you." More dark muttering from the vicinity of the work area. "He'll just be a minute."

"Okay," said Rose, sounding confused, and a little concerned. "In that case, Jack, allow me to introduce you to a good friend of mine. This is Toshiko Sato, one of our most respected scientists here at Torchwood. She's the one who came up with the brilliant device you've got the Doctor working on. She's…ummm…got some questions for the Doctor…about the work he's doing, is that all right?"

Jack's eyes immediately connected with Tosh's from across the room. He could see the shock written in them as she froze in place, one hand gripping the cold iron railing as if it were a the only thing keeping her centered in this universe.

"Hello," came Tosh's familiar voice over the intercom, "Nice to meet you. Look, I hate to be blunt, but there's something I need to discuss with this Doctor bloke about the design he chose to work on."

Jack had not thought before about the possibility of there being alternate versions of his friends populating the other universe. Sure, as a concept, he knew it had to be so, but understanding that parallel universes were a possibility was a completely different animal than being presented with hard nosed confirmation of the oh-so-similar existence of those on the other side. It made sense that Tosh would end up in Torchwood in both universes, that being where her talents lay, but was there an alternate Owen tending the wounded of that far off agency? Was there an alternate Ianto somewhere pouring tea? Was alternate Gwen still a cop, manning police lines in the rain and breaking up domestic disputes? And this brought another, even more disturbing thought to his mind. 'When the alternate universe is wiped out, it's not just Rose and Mickey I'll be losing, but other friends I don't even know are there.'

And what would it feel like to know that he didn't have the power to save any of them? That all he could do was sit there and let the members of his team be erased from existence. An alternative existence, of course, but that didn't make it any less viable; any less real. It was all well and good to try and tell yourself that they weren't really your friends, just some made up version of them that didn't matter at all. But it was a lot harder to push those people out of your mind when they could speak to him, when they were reaching out to try and help his team, when the power to help them was so tantalizingly near to, and simultaneously distant from, his grasp.

Jack flicked his eyes guiltily over to where Tosh had collapsed into a desk chair, her eyes cartoon wide and white above the prominent curve of her cheekbones. "Nice of you to join the team Ms. Sato," he commented, "I have a feeling we won't have any difficulties working together.

The Doctor advanced towards the com desk, one hand rubbing sheepishly at the back of his neck. Picking up a second com that Tosh had set up just for these purposes, the Doctor used his most confident voice. "Doctor speaking, what seems to be the problem?"

"Ah, Doctor sir," the alternate Tosh seemed a lot less sure of herself, a lot more nervous, when finally addressing the strange alien man she had likely heard so much about. "Sorry to bother you...I don't mean to be keeping you from you work."

"Not at all." The Doctor hopped up next to Jack on the desk, and Jack was uncomfortably reminded of the last conversation they had like this.

"Well," alterna-Tosh continued tentatively. "It's the model you've chosen. The C-165?"

"Yes." Jack and the Doctor shared a meaningful glance, suspecting what was coming next.

"It takes a tremendous amount of power."

"I'm aware of that."

"And it would need a quantum level conversion device."

"Yep." The Doctor popped the 'p' irreverently.

"And it won't work on both ends at once."

"Nope." The Doctor didn't pop anything this time.

"What?!" said Jack's Tosh, coming up out of her chair in alarm.

"What?!" cried Rose from someplace in the alternate Torchwood.

"What?" asked Martha, more quietly, her eyes probing into the Doctor's face. "I don't get it."

"I mean," said the other Tosh, "It won't do anything to close our rift. And we don't have the kind of technology to make our own models work." A long silence ensued in both universes as her words sank in, were digested, and came back up as stinging bile.

"WHAT?!" Donna shrieked. "Doctor," she demanded, pushing through the line of Torchwood members separating him from her until she stood directly in front of his impassive gaze, "It can't be true, can it? You wouldn't let that happen? You _couldn't _let that happen." Her voice broke off in a near sob, and the Doctor looked away.

"No, I believe Ms. Sato has hit the nail on the head." He sighed heavily, and raised his palms in a helpless gesture. "There's…nothing I can do." It was a lame explanation, and the Doctor seemed to know it.

"You mean all this time, all this damn work we've been doing, it's all been for nothing?"

The Doctor turned his gaze to Owen, "I wouldn't exactly call working to keep your own universe intact 'nothing'."

"Jack," Owen grasped at his leader's sleeve, a look of wild desperation in his eyes. "Let me try the bio-transport. I can't get everybody, but maybe…" Jack looked at his friend. Always so aggressive, so cynical, so coarse. Jack had hesitated from recruiting him originally, that was until he had seen him work to save a dying patient. Seen him channel that rage into hands massaging a paralyzed heart, heedless of the blood soaking into his lap, begging the unfortunate victim to hold on, just hold on, don't give up on him now damnit. Owen, for all his boorish nature, just couldn't stand to see innocents get hurt. Jack had known, with him on the team, human life would never become an afterthought. His very nature railed against collateral damage.

Jack shook his head sadly at Owen. "We can't," he said, ignoring the rebellious flare in the man's eyes, "We need the power it would use to save ourselves."

Donna gave an inarticulate howl and gripped the doctor by his lapels. "Doctor, come on," she pleaded, "There must be something you can do for them all. Remember Pompeii? Something! Anything!" The Doctor continued to avoid her gaze and his silence was answer enough. Turning away in despair, she collapsed into Martha's arms.

The Doctor's revelation seemed to have triggered an equally violent reaction in the alternate universe. Jack could hear incomprehensible arguments raging in the background. Closer to the mic, Rose was questioning her Tosh for particulars. The Doctor appeared to be listening to her calm, logical queries, his head tipped to one side in concentration. The other Tosh tried to keep her explanations straightforward and her voice steady, but she eventually failed at the latter. Devolving into short gasping breaths and a high whining voice just south of terrified, Tosh the second broke down into uncontrolled tears. In the face of the unseen woman's collapse, the Doctor seemed to fold in on himself. Dropping his head into his hands, his own shoulders shaking with emotion, though no tell-tale sounds of remorse ever escaped his lips.

Martha shook off Donna's restraining grasp, and advanced towards the Doctor, her concern for him plain on her face. She stopped short just in front of him, as if not sure what to do to help…not sure if there was anything she could do.

"Doctor," said Rose, seemingly sensing his distress from across incomprehensible distance. "Doctor it's…it's all right. I…we, understand." Jack would be forever amazed at the particularly one-sided devotion the Doctor seemed to inspire in people. Martha had walked the world for his sake. Jack had waited centuries and died countless deaths just trying to get back to him. Rose, it seemed, would forever be looking to offer comfort to the ancient Time Lord, even in her hour of greatest need. To forgive him for past sins and mistakes that he would never, _never_ grant himself clemency from. "It's no more…well, no less…than we expected. We knew the odds of any of our plans actually working was close to nil, but…but we had to try. And 's…'s not like we'll even know anything's happenin'. The universe'll just be gone…and you and Jack and Shireen and everyone back on old earth will go on just as if everything was…was normal. And…and that's good," she asserted. "And I don't regret it one bit. Not a damn thing! Not the sun or this blasted civil war or…" Here, Rose's voice broke off, but Jack could have finished her thoughts for her. 'Or traveling with you in the first place.'

"I don't regret a single moment," she continued instead, sounding more composed. "At least one universe will survive this catastrophe. At least one earth will be saved."

"I mean really," Jack could hear her smile then through her tears, and in his mind, she was beaming from beneath streaks of smeared mascara on her apple round cheeks; a look he had seen so often in the past, remembered so vividly. "I get to be Defender of Earth one last time; can't ask for much more than that in life, yeah?"

It was this last comment, apparently, that drove the Doctor over the edge. The voice on the other end, for that's how Jack had to think of it now- had to think of her lest he break down into a useless sobbing pile of time agent himself- had sounded so much like Rose in that instant. So much like the old Rose, that he had almost felt hope rise again in his chest against his will. Almost could believe for a single moment that maybe all this was enough for her. Maybe the brief time she had spent traveling with the Doctor and saving the world had been enough to satisfy her thirst for life. That maybe the little time she had been alive (God, how old was she? Twenty-two? Twenty-three?) had been so full of light and joy and fear and pain and exhaustion and pride and love…and everything else that made life worth living, that she wasn't afraid to give it up. That maybe a quick, and one might imagine relatively painless, end might be the best thing one could hope for after all was said and done. And the Doctor, with one deliberate movement, swept his arms across the com desk, and flung the computer, phone, stapler, pencil case and a large assortment of desk materials to the ground with a resounding crash. The monitor gave one desperate flash before going permanently black, pencils rolled about the floor almost purposefully, as if trying to escape the presence of the enraged alien who had freed them, and feedback blared through the speaker systems like an air raid siren. The Doctor stood immobile over it all, as if he hadn't just caused needless chaos in an already desperate situation. Stood and stared blankly into space, where he already knew there were no answers to be found. Not really. Not ever.

"What…what was that?" Rose's voice came small and scared over the PA system.

Jack shocked to find that communications were still working, dove under the desk, searching on hands and knees for the missing microphone. Finding it, and nearly fumbling it in the same instant, he spoke hesitantly, "Rose?" Then hearing his own voice coming clear over the Torchwood speakers, he continued with slightly more confidence, "We…uhhh…had a communications malfunction." He pulled himself out from under the desk, and glared furiously at the Time Lord, without effect. The Doctor had ceased staring into space, and had now squeezed his eyes shut tight, his head tilted slightly to one side, as if trying to make out the comments of some faint internal monologue. Jack was pathetically glad, to tell the truth. He really didn't want to see the Doctor's eyes right then.

"Oh, well," unsure and tentative, Rose continued. "I….look, I'm going to have to tell some of the remaining upper level government folks about this. It's not exactly something we're going to share with the world, mind; no reason to make people more desperate than they already are, but I do have to keep the brass informed." She trailed off of the subject thoughtfully, "'s still my job. For a while yet, anyways."

Jack nodded, understanding. Then, realizing that Rose, of course, couldn't hear the marbles in his head shaking over the radio, said, "Right. And we'll keep you informed of everything that's happening here." There was nothing else he could offer her now, besides assurance that things were going as well as they could on his side of the rift. He could keep her appraised, right up until the very end, of the Doctor's progress…of their group's efforts to save the world of Rose's origin. Maybe…maybe he could get ahold of that Shireen friend of hers she had mentioned and let them talk a bit over the com. He wouldn't even drug the girl afterwards; would let her be one of three people in this universe who always remembered Rose Tyler and what happened to her, though she'd more than likely be the first of them to pass on. But then, maybe not. Without her having to say so, he knew that there was only one thing left in either universe that Rose really gave a damn about. And if that blithering moron could get his head out of his behind long enough before the end to actually tell Rose what he felt in return, then maybe this whole foray into intra-universal communications would have actually been worth it after all.

"Right," Rose agreed, "You do that. And we'll make sure to maintain the connection on our end as long as we can."

Jack was going to say something in reply, perhaps something comforting (though what he could have said at that point was beyond him), when the com was roughly ripped from his hands.

"Rose," the Doctor shouted with barely controlled emotion, "Rose, what did you just say?" White showed around the whole of the Doctor's irises and his bangs bounced as he turned a suddenly desperate gaze on Jack.

"I-" Rose stuttered, flustered by the sudden change in tack, "I said we'd try and keep the radio connection going even though, well, you know."

The swirling mud-grey of stagnant bogs. The moist dark of freshly turned loam. That soft coffee brown of roasted beans, again. The smooth russet sheen of mahogany dining tables. The chocolate brown Jack always associated with Labrador Retrievers of that denotation. All within a heartbeat. Well, maybe two; if they were fast enough and naturally out of sync with one another. The Doctor's lids slid shut over the dancing light show of his eyes, and a smile that couldn't help but tug at the deepest and most secret strings of Jack's heart split his face. "Fantastic."

Jack blinked. Martha blinked. Donna drew her head back in surprise and alarm. The rest of the Torchwood team exchanged sideways glances and wondered if this sort of thing were entirely normal. Rose asked the question for all of them. "Sorry, what's fantastic?"

"You are," the Doctor opened his eyes again (still chocolate), smiling, if such were possible, even wider than before. "Rose Tyler, you brilliant, amazing, stupendous girl, are fantastic."

"Ummm….thanks?" Rose now joined the others in bewilderment. "Did I do something?"

"Yes!" the Doctor cried, as if whatever had caused his excited reverie just now should have been intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. "Connection! Of course! Why didn't I think of it before?!"

The look that Martha flashed at Jack plainly begged, 'Please tell me you have some idea what he's going on about?' Jack briefly shook his head at her in response. The Doctor leaned one hand against the now empty com desk and cradled the mic beneath his chin with the other. His gaze looked to burn a hole through the concrete walls. "Rose," he said, serious now, "Do you have anything from the TARDIS with you? Anything you or Mickey the Not-Quite-So-Much-Of-An-Idiot-As-He-Used-To-Be kept around just for old time's sake?" There was a pause, and in that moment, Jack thought he could see all of creation hover for an instant in the Doctor's view, as if on the edge of a great precipice, about to tumble over.

"Well…" Rose's voice was careful, "There's my TARDIS key."

The universe trembled, caught itself, and stepped gently away from the cliff. The Doctor hung his head, his shoulders seeming to collapse in on one another with evident relief.

"You still wear that old thing?" Mickey's voice came clear over the intercom and Jack realized he'd been silent now for quite a while. Years, it seemed. He'd almost forgotten that he was in the room with Rose.

"'s all I have, Mick," Rose replied. "Got dropped here with nothin' more'n the clothes on my back, and this." There was a tremor in her voice she fought desperately to conceal. "It's the only thing I've got to remind me of home."

Home, of course, was not Jack's universe. It wasn't London or earth or the Milky Way. If it were, Mickey and Rose's absent mum might have felt a bit left out of her list of memorabilia. No, 'Home', Jack understood, was the TARDIS. It always would be. Well, always was a relative term. As long as Rose was alive, that's how she was likely to think of things. And, Jack realized suddenly, despite the twanging, featherlike breath of expectation in his own breast, despite the evident relief in the Doctor's very posture, no one had actually said anything definitive yet to imply that Rose might have a chance at living much more than a few hours.

"Doctor," he queried softly, "What do you have?"

Chocolate brown eyes turned themselves on the former time agent, and there was nothing soft in them at all. Hard and sure and with a determination 900 years in the making, they fairly glowed.

"Hope."


	16. Chapter 15

Jack found himself demoted to the rank of gopher.

He had spent the last half hour running back and forth between the control room and the TARDIS getting various items at the Doctor's request. After the 5th round trip, he had breathlessly requested that the Doctor move the police box out of his office and down to the main floor, thus saving him the run up and down stairs. Clearly, there was a need for someone to 'go-for' this or that, whatever was needed to fit a certain situation, but previously that someone had always been Ianto. Ianto, however, was busy doing other things right now. Namely, turning on the great Torchwood backup generators and patching them into the local residential electric circuits of the city. The Doctor, it transpired, was going to need more energy than even the rift could produce in order to shore up the breach in two universes simultaneously. Basically, every light in a twelve block radius of downtown Cardiff was going to wink out…and likely more than that. Ianto had remarked that this wasn't a worry, because Torchwood had contingency generators for just such an outage. Upon hearing this, the Doctor immediately insisted they start up the generators as he would happily drain those as well.

No one knew the bowels of the Torchwood complex better than Ianto, and so he had been given the job of finding them access to more power…whatever the cost. He had taken Donna with him, and Jack couldn't help but smile at the thought of the two of them together in the dark of the basement. He hoped whatever they were supposedly doing with the power grid, they weren't working at it too hard.

Meanwhile, Tosh was working full time on the rift device she had, apparently, invented. Now it was Owen who held the football steady for her, as she tinkered at it with a rather mundane screwdriver. Sitting as still as he could and staring at the stark white part in her hair as she kneeled delicately before him, Owen seemed ready to swallow his own tongue before saying something to disturb her concentration. He had been uncharacteristically reticent ever since their most recent revealing conversation with the other side, and he seemed continually ill at ease hearing the voice of Tosh II, as they'd started referring to their friend's alter-ego, over the control room loudspeakers.

Tosh II was working on a comparable rift device on the other side, using a partially completed model she had developed, but eventually discarded because of her inability to work around certain structural design problems. Problems which, it seemed, the Doctor had managed to eliminate. She checked in every few minutes with questions about how the Doctor had done something or the other, and Owen flinched every single time. Jack had to admit, it was unnerving hearing his friend's voice coming from opposite sides of the control room at the same time, but he couldn't help but think that Owen was suffering from some additional discomfort he couldn't quite comprehend. Tosh, over her initial shock, was now taking it all in stride and conversing with herself as if they were old acquaintances. It was spooky, really, the way the two of them finished each others sentences.

The Doctor had given up work on the rift device entirely, declaring Tosh (both of them) eminently qualified to finish the work on her own. Rather, he had turned all of his attention to a machine which looked, at the moment, pretty much like a camera tripod overtopped with an egg whisk and with the Doctor's TARDIS key dangling from the center of it like a pendulum. This, the Doctor claimed, when hooked up to the rift device and the TARDIS in tandem, would allow them to connect (via the Torchwood 7 radio frequency and Rose's old TARDIS key) to the corresponding rift device Tosh II was hurriedly constructing on the other side. Then, if Jack had the science correct- admittedly a humongous assumption- the alternate rift device could draw upon the power being funneled through the TARDIS on this side and use that energy to clean up the rips on its end of the destructive time/space anomaly. The whole concept centered around the fact that the TARDIS could recognize portions of itself, that it could lock on to its own distinct signature of huon energy, and that it was inherently connected to each and every piece of itself in every instance of time and space throughout its existence… including, in this case, across realities.

It sounded to Jack much like some crazy plot device from a poorly funded sci-fi television show. But as Jack's life was pretty much just like some late night sci-fi extravaganza, who was he to question.

Martha was helping the Doctor. Much like Owen, her job seemed to be holding things steady and trying to stay out of his way. The gaze she cast over the Doctor, though, was anything but circumspect. There was blatant adoration in that look. And sadness. And something that looked a little like resolve. If the Doctor noticed, he said not a word. Jack rather suspected that he did, and he hated the Doctor just a little for his inevitable reaction.

Jack came to the sudden realization that everyone had paired off naturally. Everyone but him, that was.

"Hey," came Gwen's voice from behind him, "You got a mo'?" Jack ripped himself out of his deep consideration of his friends and co-workers and looked over at Gwen.

"And just exactly where have you been," he retorted accusingly. Was she always going to pull him off balance like that?

"Lookin' for these." Gwen held up a collection of thick metal chains and partially rusted padlocks.

Jack raised an eyebrow at her. "Kinky."

"Shut it," she grumbled back, but failed completely in her attempt to hide her smile from him. As always, the slight coloring of her cheeks in response to his teasing always warmed him to the core. "They're for the weevils."

"Very kinky," Jack said, raising both eyebrows this time,

"Arrrggghh," Gwen growled in amused frustration and rolled her eyes. Jack tried to ignore how those actions also flushed him with warmth. "They're for the doors you twit! To the cellblock!"

"What about the doors?" Jack's face went from amusement to concern in the space of a breath,

"They've got electric locks."

"Right." Jack grimaced and flicked his eyes over to the count-down clock. One hour and roughly 20 minutes remaining. Reports of increasingly strange occurrences had been coming in from all over Cardiff all evening. They had given up trying to track the weevil sightings, and unlike the comparatively harmless flying (well, falling anyways) fish, most of the more novel appearances were causing problems upstairs. Gwen had gotten a frantic call from her former partner not too long ago, telling her the theatre district had been taken over by giant walking trees and begging her for some suggestion of what to do?

"Tell them Dunsinane is in Scotland, not Wales!" Jack had shouted unhelpfully from across the room in answer to her query.

Ianto had made an equally tongue in cheek comment about Middle Earth being in New Zealand. The Doctor advised her not to worry as, in his experience, tree species were generally pacifistic. Unless they were hornbeams. These walking trees weren't hornbeams were they? Sorry, Gwen's partner had commented, but he'd skipped tree identification in police academy. Ultimately, the only thing Gwen had been able to tell him was to stay put in the precinct and let the professionals deal with it. That was, once they got around to it. Which, if everyone was incredibly lucky, would happen in about two hours time…give or take. Until then, Torchwood's hands were just as tied as those of the overmatched police force, if not more so. Priority one was to close the rift…on both sides if at all possible. Priority two was, well, everything else. Oh, and just to put the icing on the cake, why don't we plunge all of Cardiff into a blackout before we're through? Sounds like a great plan. Sighing, Jack relieved Gwen of several loops of chain-link. "Let's go reinforce the cellblock, shall we."

It was dark in the damp halls under the main control room, and Jack mentally kicked himself for not bringing along a torch. Gwen shivered at the sudden decrease in temperature- they weren't far from the morgue here- and Jack sparked up a conversation to lighten their mood.

"So, what does Rhys think of all this?" Ever since Gwen's fiancé had been invited into the Torchwood fold (to a certain extent, anyways) Jack had been asking Gwen for her significant other's opinions on their different cases and adventures. It was interesting to hear everything from a civilian's point of view. Jack had to admit that he had lived with the odd bits of the universe for so long that he didn't really have his finger on the pulse of what passed for normal anymore. Talking to Gwen…well, talking with Gwen about Rhys made him realize sometimes that they way he looked at things trended towards the inhuman, and her comments encouraged him, on occasion, to alter his plans and prejudices. For the better, he thought. It's why he'd brought Gwen on the team in the first place. To get an outsider's perspective on life down the rabbit hole.

"I told him ta' stay inside," she answered, "Hang work for a day." A cloud passed over her brow, barely discernable in the low light of the tunnels. "He heard about the weevils on the telly. He was worried about me of course. I told him everything was fine."

"Guess you glossed over the end of the world bit then." Gwen nodded. "And he didn't ask about the fish?"

Gwen tossed her head and pushed a handful of dark hair behind her ear. "I told him that was just natural phenomenon. Frogs fall from the sky sometimes, don't they?" She asked him with her eyes, her tongue poking with consternation at the tiny gap in her teeth.

"Yes," Jack smiled, "Regular earth frogs. I'm not sure how well that translates to purple alien fish raining down on Millennium Centre."

"Yeah, well," Gwen laughed, "He's not the sharpest tool in the shed, my Rhys." Jack would have pushed for more, but they had reached the cellblock door. From behind it came the concentrated growls of way too many weevils. The cells were overflowing, and their occupants appeared to be engaged in various stages of dominance fighting, mating attempts and just general raging against their captors. All in all, it did not make for very pleasant background noise.

"Let's get this done quick, shall we?" Jack suggested, and the two of them worked with alacrity, stringing the chains about and across the door for reinforcement. How well they would hold up against a concerted weevil attack remained to be seen. Not too well, was Jack's guess. At best they would only slow the weevils down a bit before they flowed like lemmings out of their basement prison, intent on hunting down the very individuals who put them there. But they were better than nothing.

"There," Jack said, turning the large ancient key in the final lock. "That should-" the area around him and Gwen went eerily and entirely black "- do it," he finished lamely. Jack couldn't see a thing. He would have said he couldn't see his hand in front of his face, but then he would have felt compelled to actually raise his hand up to his face and check for certainty. As it was, he was pretty much frozen with misapprehension, feeling that if he twitched a single muscle he would fall off some unseen cliff to an unimaginably distant floor below. His stomach fluttered as if he were already falling. He stared straight ahead where, moments before, the door to the weevil cells had been. The only sounds in the darkness were his own overquick breaths, and Gwen's corresponding near-hysterical wheeze.

BOOM

Jack flinched, coming a good two inches off the ground in his alarm. Pounding. Pounding coming from the other side of the metal door just before him. He suddenly found Gwen's arms wrapped tightly about his waist and her face pressed into his chest. At least, he hoped it was hers. It was still too dark to see anything. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his sidearm.

BOOM BOOM BOOM

Oh, this was not good. Freeing his gun from his hip pocket, Jack pointed it roughly in the direction he remembered the door being. Gwen tightened her grip, and Jack could feel the excited tips of her breasts poking into his chest through the thin cloth of her blouse. Gritting his teeth, and straining his eyes hopelessly in the darkness, Jack forced himself to think about cricket. Long ago he had found that baseball was just too erotic a sport to rely on in difficult situations such as this. Cricket, however, had just enough dry English reserve to it to make it a near perfect balm to any potential arousal.

Golf also worked.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Right time to go. Searching for Gwen's hand in the pitch-black, and settling on her elbow instead, he started leading her off, as best he could, down the passageway on his left that they had walked companionably down, joking, just minutes before. After twenty steps in that direction the volume of the pounding increased, and Jack started to run. Pulling Gwen along behind him, and hoping he wouldn't concuss himself against any walls in his haste, he made a beeline for where he figured the stairwell could be found. Behind him, squealing a counterpoint to the padding of Gwen's trainers on the stone floors, Jack could hear the sound of stretching metal as the door to the cellblock was slowly forced from its hinges.


	17. Chapter 16

Jack and Gwen stumbled into the hub and were immediately blinded as the piercing beams of several torch-lights swung in their direction. Holding his palm out in front of him to fend off the glare, Jack squinted in an attempt to make up the faces of his team members. Recognizing Ianto's lanky form by its familiar outline he turned in that direction.

"Whose idea was it to turn off the lights?!"

"Ah, that would be mine," came the Doctor's lecturing voice from somewhere off in the shadows. "It appears our time-table has been moved up a tad and I thought it best to make hay while the sun shines…even though it's nighttime…well, the sun's always shining somewhere of course…though not necessarily where they grow hay-"

"Doctor!" Martha's voice lectured from somewhere in the same vicinity.

"Right, sorry."

Jack glanced towards where the TARDIS had been. He could make out the outline of its doorway, lit from within. A strange humming filled the hub, the kind of sound you felt more than heard, which played havoc with the hairs on the back of your neck. Ianto was next to him, then, and handing him a spare torch. "We're locked into the main Cardiff power grid," he said, adjusting his tie uncomfortably. "I just hope it's enough."

"Why, what's our timetable look like now?" asked Jack.

"Forty-two minutes," Tosh called from the opposite side of the room. Jack could see her kneeling on the floor grating with the football shaped instrument between her knees, a torch balanced on its end before her and casting light strangely upwards so that her nose and cheekbones drew odd shadows across her face. Like she was sitting around a campfire and telling a ghost story, complete with cheesy lighting effects.

Jack looked to Ianto for confirmation, but his friend's attention was on the gasping girl at his side. It occurred to Jack that he still had Gwen's elbow in a death grip and, slightly more unusual, she had her fingers slipped into his belt loop, still holding on for dear life. He looked down into her flushed face, into the striking blue eyes that were her best feature. They were a darker blue around the edges, and lighter towards the center where her pupils, now contracted in the shine of the torch light, glowed like black pearls. He had always found them striking, but now they were wide with fear. Suddenly Jack remembered why they had been sprinting into the control room in the first place. "Oh, yeah, I almost forgot." He turned to face the way he had just come, brandishing his still unholstered pistol. "We've got company."

"What kind of company?" Owen asked, ranging up on Jack's other side, and sounding rather hungrier for a fight than Jack thought was necessary at the moment. Before Jack could respond, though, Ianto took the initiative, leaping forward and grabbing ahold of the twisting handle on the round bank vault door. 'Right,' thought Jack, hurrying to add his own strength to the often temperamental barricade, 'Why didn't I think of that.'

Between them, Jack, Ianto and Owen managed to get the heavy door slid shut, and not a moment too soon. The hollow thud of dense flesh against hard metal began to echo through the door's thickness only seconds after the door had closed.

"There," announced Jack triumphantly, "That should hold them."

"Until they find one of the other ways up into the hub from down below," Ianto commented ominously.

Of course. Jack sighed. He knew it was too good to be true. This was just a short lived reprieve. And how short lived? He turned his eyes to where the countdown clock had been. He could still see the gleam of its digital numbers lighting up the corner of Owen's desk; bathing all in a threatening red haze that Jack associated unpleasantly with working the night shift on a battle cruiser. It must have some sort of battery backup. Thirty nine minutes left. "Well let's just hope it takes them more than 40 minutes to figure it out."

While Jack had been busy with the door, Gwen had made her way across the room and was now deep in discussion with Donna. The two of them looked worried…and green. A disturbing neon, almost radioactive, gleam covered them both, and Jack was concerned for a moment until he realized the two were standing in a circle of light-sticks which some enterprising individual had snapped open and placed about the floor. The eerie glow had turned Donna's scarlet locks an unattractive mud brown, and reflected off Gwen's slick black hair in waves of color running down its length. Before the two kneeled the Doctor and Martha, still engrossed with the Doctor's tripod thing-a-ma-gig. The whites of Martha's eyes stood out as a stark contrast to her dark face, and picked up the strange light around them until they seemed almost like little lime-lights in the gloom. In contrast, the Doctor's pupils seemed to drag in all the light from their vermillion surroundings, concentrate it, and reflect it out back into the world with a much greater intensity than should have been possible given normal physics. Dark portals filled with pinpricks of emerald, like the bright flash of nervous wildlife you'd get in the sweep of a car's headlamps on a dark country road. The whole scene was just…surreal…and Jack had to physically shake himself out of his reverie.

"Jack," the Doctor called, never looking up in his concentration, "I'm gonna need someone to figure out the exact location of my TARDIS key."

"Okay," Jack replied with cheeky confidence, and striding over to the greenish group, pointed authoritatively at the key suspended from the tripod. "It's right there." This time the Doctor did look up from his work, and gave Jack a withering stare that, given the present disturbing state of his eyes, filled the pit of Jack's stomach with more than a little unwarranted terror.

"We need to be able to tell the folks on the other side exactly where it is," the Doctor went on in a long suffering tone, "So they can put Rose's key as close to it's physical twin as possible." He went back to working on his device, the blue light of the sonic screwdriver mixing with the over all greenish hue and making everything look queerer than it already did. "We need to trick the TARDIS into thinking they're the same exact thing, so we want them in the same exact place. The other world's Torchwood complex can't be too different from this one's. Triangulate the position of my key to the inch and help them figure out where to put theirs."

It was a command, plain and simple. And if there was one thing Jack had learned to do pretty well during his time with the Doctor, it was follow instructions. Usually, the Doctor asked politely, but when he got to the point of just telling you off in that completely inarguable way of his, it was best just to play along. Disobedience usually turned out poorly for all involved. Plus, those weirdly reflective eyes were spooky.

"Gotcha," Jack affirmed, then turned to Ianto. "You still got that tape measure?" The man's flustered reaction was as good as a yes. "Then let's get to it."


	18. Chapter 17

"Right!" asserted the Doctor, some thirty minutes later, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "I think that does it. Ready on your side Toshiko Two?"

"Umm…" was her uncertain reply. "I think so…I mean…I followed all your directions. The thing _should_ work, but…"

"But what?"

"Well," the answer was timid, evasive. "What if I'm wrong?" she whispered, frightened.

"Then you and everything in your universe will be destroyed in an instant. Puffed out of existence entirely, as if it were never there." Jack shot an annoyed look at the Doctor. He wasn't helping matters with his business as usual manner.

"Oh," Tosh II's voice sounded shaky over the com. "I think I'm gonna be sick." This was followed by a clatter, as if she had dropped the microphone before taking off towards the closest loo.

"Me too," commented Tosh, at Jack's elbow, looking a tad green. Jack was about to suggest that she sit down when a loud banging coming from one of the hub's open basement doorways grabbed his attention. Guttural growls punctuated by howls of triumph could be heard echoing up from the floors below. It looked as though the weevils had found their alternate way in. With barely a glance to direct them to their duties, Owen, Tosh and Ianto took off in a blur of swinging torch lights to find weapons and cover the vulnerable doorway. Jack turned to Gwen and shook his head. He wanted her to stick with him for a while longer. Besides, she was still the worst of them with a gun.

"'s all right Doctor," Rose piped up, "I can take over from here."

"Good, we'll get it done together!" The Doctor smiled with glee. He was almost bouncing on his toes, the apparent rush of adrenaline at being this close to completion of their plan bringing a familiar jocularity to his actions and words. "Just like old times," he enthused, sounding more like his old self than he had ever since Jack had thrown himself at the rapidly disappearing police box in Millennium Centre.

"Yeah," Rose agreed, and the Doctor stopped bouncing. Turning suddenly serious in that mercurial way of his, he lowered his voice in consternation.

"Thing is, someone is going to have to stay with your rift machine and flip the switch at the exact moment we turn ours on over here."

"And what's so bad about that?"

"There will be considerable electric discharge once the two devices interact." The Doctor didn't seem to be getting to the point anytime quickly. The red numbers of the count-down clock continued to roll. Rose was pointed in her next question, keeping the Doctor on track.

"Exactly what kind of electric discharge are we talking about here?"

The Doctor was silent for a moment, screwing his face up and glancing at the shadow doused ceiling. "Ever heard of ball lightning?" he asked finally.

"Oh," said Rose, abruptly. 'Oh,' thought Jack with a hint of worry.

"It'll probably be delayed on your side, take a few seconds to pop across the universes but, still…"

"Doesn't leave a whole bunch of time to get running," Rose finished for him. "Right, Mickey, you clear the room. Actually, clear the whole floor. " Rose was in the command zone now. Jack had always thought she would make a good leader, just that she always seemed perfectly happy to hide in the Doctor's shadow. It was the same with him, though. He'd been in more than his fair share of wars, commanded whole battalions of competent folks, sent a significant number of them to their deaths, too, but when it came to the Doctor, he just knew he was completely outranked.

Rose's actions had put him in mind of his own position, though, and he suddenly realized that his Torchwood team was in need of some direction. "Gwen," he shouted, spinning around with his long coat flapping to find her, as always it seemed, right in his shadow. "Get Donna and Martha to the med bay. The floor and walls are all stone, so it should be safe."

"What about you Jack?" Her look was worried, and full of something else that Jack didn't have time to think about right then (that he never allowed himself the time to think about, no matter how often he saw it).

"Agent Clements," came Rose's hastily barked orders, "Disconnect the automatic fire prevention system. I do _not_ want it raining in here."

"I'll be fine," Jack replied, tension causing his voice to strain and almost break (It was the tension, right? Not her concern for him. No, never that). "Just get yourself and the others someplace safe!" And with that he spun her around and pushed her along her way. She stumbled off towards where Donna and Martha cringed, weaponless against the imminent weevil incursion.

"Owen," Jack raised his voice to be heard above the noise of the whirring TARDIS, the deep throated growls of the weevils, and the electric twang of the Torchwood team's gunfire ricocheting off of metal walls. Owen turned briefly towards him in response. "Keep them off as long as you can, but fall back to the med bay when I give the word!" Jack waved enthusiastically with both his arms in the direction he was indicating. Owen's eyes narrowed in confusion, but he nodded his understanding before returning his attention to his gun sights and firing again.

"Doctor," Rose breathed suddenly into the microphone on her end, "Tell me what I have to do to work this thing."

The Doctor shook his head, then spoke aloud for her benefit. "It's too dangerous Rose." There was something in his tone that Jack recognized. Something that had a bit of his old Northern burr to it.

"Yeah, well, danger and me, we're old friends."

The Doctor lifted splayed hands up to his face and buried his fingers in the thick hair at his temples. "I can't…" he started. Shook his head as if trying to clear it. "No," he said, and this time he wasn't talking to Rose. Speaking barely above a whisper, he admonished himself, "I won't do this again. I can't." And Jack realized it wasn't the accent that was familiar, no the Doctor still had the flat tone of London stuck to his tongue, and he wasn't just channeling old blue eyes for a moment. No, it was as if the whole cadence of his speech, the pitch and balance and tempo, had altered of their own accord. Were approximating the way he used to speak…to her of course…only to her.

Jack knew, then, that the Doctor wouldn't press the button. Letting her universe collapse around her was one thing. He couldn't be blamed for that; he hadn't caused the rift. And though he may have been both the impetus and the inspiration behind Rose's ingenious plan to siphon Sol for energy, he had never taken her hand and right out told her how to do it. But this. He would be the one to throw the switch. He would be the one bringing the wrath of an electrical storm down upon her. It would be as good as writing her death sentence. And even if she did manage to survive, if her years of wearing out rubber trainers by the Doctor's side had managed to prepare her for the sprint of her life, they'd never know it on this side of the rift. Even if she didn't die at his hands, he'd spend the rest of his long, lonely existence, thinking he had.

The Doctor wouldn't move forward, not to hurt Rose Tyler. Not without prompting, anyways. Jack knew he had to do something to spring the Doctor into action, and he was disgusted with himself for knowing exactly what it was. "Doctor?" he queried. The Doctor looked at him with eyes that no longer reflected the odd green glow of the light-sticks, but rather seemed to swallow everything bright that touched them into an endless swirling blackness. "We're running out of time." And with a slight gesture, he indicated the countdown clock, its numbers continuing to flip, heedless of their effect on those around them. The Doctor went rigid with heartrending resignation.

"Jack's right Doctor," Rose said, her voice even and comforting. "We've got to get these rifts closed…whatever the cost."

The Doctor's face was a mask. "You sure you want to do this?"

"Course," she replied as brightly as she could muster. "Runnin's the first thing you ever taught me, yeah?"

"Like hell you will!" That was Mickey breaking in.

"Mickey, I told you to clear the floor," irritation evident in her voice. "'s not safe here."

"I know, and you're not gonna be the one sticking around to face a bloody lightning storm alone."

"I'm a big girl Mickey, I can take care of myself." Rose's voice was rising now, in uncontrollable anger. Reaching those higher notes she usually tried to avoid because they made her sound like a sick muppet. But she had clearly forgotten herself in her disappointment with Mickey. Had clearly forgotten there was a slew of strangers a universe away listening with rapt attention to their argument like it was an old time radio show.

"I'm not letting you do this. You're Acting Director; hell, you're Torchwood Director in everythin' but name, and right now that's just about the highest governmental position left in Brittania. And I'll be damned if I let you get deep fried just to prove some silly feminist point."

"No Mick," her voice turned introspective, though with no less conviction to it. "I'm the one who got us into this mess and I'm going to get us out of it too."

"You? You never even wanted to _be_ here! At least I chose this life, but you-"

"Agent Smith I am not going to argue with you. You will leave this room right now and that is an order!"

A pregnant pause was followed by Mickey's surly response, "Whatever you say Ms. Jones."

"Thank you," Rose continued, with much greater composure. That angry voice of superior insistence had sounded odd coming from her. It was obviously not something she was used to using, especially with her best mate.

"Now Doctor, tell me what I'm supposed to be doing with…Mickey? What the hell? Mickey, no! Stop! What are you doing you-"

"Bastard!" Rose's last insult had not reverberated with the tin can echo of the hub loudspeakers, it hadn't shouted itself simultaneously from several points around the circular control room, and though the voice that uttered it was piercingly loud with fury, it was considerably more quite than it had been just moments before.

And it was coming from behind him.

Jack spun around, his torch in hand. The light beam played across the rows of dark faced computers, the desks strewn with extra wiring and half eaten sandwiches, the towering central column, and came to rest on the figure of a young woman in bleached jeans and a pink tank top. She was thinner than he remembered, hips and elbows sticking out starkly and making odd shadows in his torch beam. Her spaghetti-strap top clung to her, damp patches showing through between her shoulder blades and beneath her heaving breasts. A fine sheen of sweat glowed in beads across her shoulders and up the curve of her graceful neck. Hair gone slightly stringy from lack of washing, and with the golden blonde gleaming in a striking line several inches down from the top of her head, where more subdued and darker blonde hair now grew, was pulled back from her face in a black ribbon. Several strands had worked themselves loose and plastered onto the back of her neck. Taut muscles bulged on her forearm, as she clutched at a strange round device with a glassy orange button on the top of it; holding it away from her as far as she could, as if trying to push it off, but fighting a losing battle since the device appeared to be attached to a thin chain looped over her head and half tangled in her two toned hair. Blinking in the strange light, she peered about herself nervously, her jaw dropping open in shock.

Mickey the bloody-fucking genius.


	19. Chapter 18

The Doctor spun around, only an instant slower on the uptake than Jack had been. Rose had materialized only a couple steps behind the Time Lord, and now she turned her stricken gaze on him.

"Rose?"

It was the disbelief in his voice that did it. The man who took it in stride to do nine impossible things before breakfast, who had conversed familiarly with everything from sentient plant life to aggressive energy beings to former incarnations of himself, who didn't blow up a sun _every_ day, was shocked beyond all imagining that the universe would actually do something nice for him for a change. His voice, normally so self assured- bordering, if Jack were to be honest about it, on the egotistical- quavered with uncertainty, almost breaking. And Rose, unable to reconcile the unfamiliar voice with the otherwise familiar Doctor before her, still in shock from her transporting experience, and shivering from the chill of the underground hub, gave out at the knees.

Jack leapt forward, but there was no need for his assistance. The Doctor caught her under the elbows before she collapsed to the ground. Their faces froze, mere inches apart, so that as Rose blew out her breath in an audible gasp, the Doctor immediately breathed it in. Their eyes met, locked, and time, literally, stood still.

"Doctor?" came the question in delayed response, and just as querulous- just as disbelieving.

Sorrel auburn puce tawny umber sienna bay bistre fallow sepia seal cinnamon. Jack lost track of the fluctuations of color making a pinwheel flutter out of the Doctor's suddenly glassy eyes. Ran out of adjectives to describe them. Could do nothing but stare in fascination, until the Doctor raised Rose slowly back onto her feet and turned that unstable gaze on him.

"Jack, take care of her."

Jack wrapped a strong arm about Rose's shoulders and pulled her, uncomplainingly, to his chest. Slowly, so that she wouldn't trip (she was still staring at the Doctor's face as if she couldn't believe he was there…that _she_ was there), he backed her away from the Time Lord and towards the med bay. Turning her to face the right direction he spoke softly to her, and she looked away finally to glance into his own face. "Jack," she murmured, wonderingly. Then, suddenly noticing the communicator clutched in his free hand, she ripped it from his grasp and started berating her best friend over the airwaves. "Mickey you lying _bastard_. You told me you destroyed all the personal transport devices."

"Yeah, well," his sheepish response quavered through the PA system, "Pete and I thought it might be a good idea to keep one of them around." He continued more quietly then, in a voice brimming with affection, "He made me promise, you know, if we ever found a way to the other side…if there was ever a chance to save you…get you back home where you belonged…well, we swore we'd get you there if it was the last thing we ever did."

Rose burst into tears at his admission. She buried her face into Jack's shoulder and wiped streaming eyes on his lapels. "Oh, Mickey…" she sobbed.

"Don't fret Rosie," he comforted. "'s not like you. And besides, you said a long time ago that you made your choice…well, so did I…so did your mum and Pete…and we all know that live or die your place is…is back there." Rose sobbed again, uncontrollably, and Jack lifted his free hand, the one that wasn't supporting her, to gently brush the back of her hair.

"Ummm…Mickey," the Doctor broke in. "Hate to break up the love fest, but we're sort of running out of time." Jack's eyes turned immediately to the clock. Two minutes. Shit.

"Owen!" Jack shouted at the top of his lungs, "Get everyone to the med bay NOW!" Pulling Rose from his shoulder, but still holding tight to her hand, he dashed for the relative safety of Owen's primary work area. Behind him he could hear Rose stumbling in his wake, and still shouting instructions to Mickey on the other side.

"Now you listen to me Mickey Smith. Once you flip the switch you get out of that room on the double, you hear me?! Then you take the next transport off of that bloody earth! You got that?! The very next one!"

"Okay Rose," Mickey placated, "The next transport." Jack reached the open level above the medical exam area and slowed so as not to be dragging his friend willy-nilly down the dangerous stone steps. He could hear the sharp breaths of his team as the remainder of them team pounded into the echoing circular chamber behind him. Farther off yet was an inarticulate howling. The weevils had figured out their opponents were no longer putting up a resistance.

"And you tell my mum and Alice and Pete and Jake and everyone that I love them and I'll never forget them."

"Yes Rose."

Jack reached the bottom, and nearly collided with Ianto, who had run down the opposite set of stairs. Pushing Rose bodily into his arms, he growled, "Protect her with your life." He glanced briefly at Gwen and the other girls, who were staring at their new arrival with something like awe on their faces. Then, assured that everyone was all right, he disentangled himself from Rose's grasp and retreated up the stairway.

"And don't you _dare_ forget to take care of the Doctor!"

Jack skidded to a halt, halfway up the stairs and turned towards Rose in confusion. Ianto was holding her gently by the forearms. He seemed uncomfortable with the situation, as if not entirely sure whether he should be hugging the strange girl from another dimension or holding her at a platonic arms-breadth distance. However, he and all the others gathered in the medical bay were now gazing quizzically at the pitiful, distraught, blonde haired individual in their midst. Noticing their less than circumspect glances, Rose wiped at her dripping nose with the back of her wrist and explained, "'s my cat."

"All right, Rose, I hear you. Everything's gonna be fine here, all righ'? Promise." Jack returned to his climb.

"Mickey," the voice was sobbing over the loudspeakers as he reached the upper level and turned to exit into the main hub area. "I love you."

"Love you too, Rose. Always have." Mickey's voice was sad, resigned, but when he continued it seemed to have new life. "Now Doctor, what do I do?"

Jack ripped his sidearm from his pocket and aimed it, firing at the nearest moving figure. He hoped it wasn't the Doctor. An inarticulate scream of pain assured him that it wasn't. Striding into the hub, Jack again took aim and fired, the metal of the gun beginning to burn hot in his palm. Another weevil, and two more advancing at him through the darkness, with none of his own natural tentativeness about the lack of visibility. Where the hell had the Doctor gotten to?

"It's the button on the bottom, behind the little valve that looks like an upside-down umbrella." The Doctor's voice boomed over the PA, but Jack could also just discern it coming from inside the open TARDIS doorway. Dashing in that direction, he pointed the pistol blindly behind him, and fired into the ether.

"Yeah, I think I got it," said Mickey form across the void. "On your mark then?" Jack reached the door of the TARDIS, and bracing himself against its frame, peered back into the rectangle of yellow light cast by the open doorway into the nearly black surroundings of the hub. He raised his gun as a precaution…which turned out to be a premonition, as a weevil bounded out of the darkness and directly into his line of sight. The recoil thrust his shoulder painfully into the side of the TARDIS wall.

"Yeah, why not," was the reply. Then with more seriousness, and with a deep, heartfelt, rumbling tone that Jack had never heard him use before- not in this regeneration anyways- the Doctor said, "Mickey, thank you."

"Don' mention it. Jus' take care of my girl." Jack chanced a glance over his shoulder. The Doctor stood at the TARDIS controls. The football shaped device cradled in his arms, and the switch he had been referring Mickey to beneath his fingers. The look on his face went momentarily stormy at Mickey's words. And Jack thought he could read the thoughts flitting through his mind as well as if they had been written across his high forehead. '_My_ girl,' the look said clearly. It was the same one he had flashed at Jack when he first stepped on the TARDIS. Jack rolled his eyes, and retuned his attention to the weevil attack outside.

"Right, then. On my mark. Get set…"

Jack was certain there must have been a 'Go' after that, but he never heard it. At that very same moment, three weevils poured out of the darkness simultaneously. They had never shown any capacity for language or higher thinking, but they had clearly mastered the tactics necessary for group hunting. Jack couldn't focus on all three at once. His pistol blared into the face of the fastest of them, but he missed and the hulking beast caught him about his middle and crushed him into the TARDIS' side. The second grappled his flailing arm, the one with the gun in it, and bit down hard. Through the pain and the terror and the incredible noise which suddenly seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, Jack's mind flew instantly to the Doctor, and to where the third weevil had disappeared to. Twisting in the grip of his captors, Jack strained to see into the bowels of the TARDIS.

What he saw was something that he would never forget.

Standing in a swirling amethyst cloud of glittering ion discharge, blue lightning snaking its way in circles up his arms and across the tense expanse of his shoulders, the Doctor leaned over the control panel. The Doctor's face was bathed in gold from a strange subtle light which seemed to permeate the entire area, so that sweat stood out on his brow like glimmering crystals of pyrite. Blue green sparks flew like so many roman candles across the controls; danced fairy lights along the Doctor's hand where it gripped one of the levers and set his skin aglow with unearthly radiance each time one touched him. Patterns of orange fire rolled up and down the Doctor's back between his shoulder blades; and as if he could feel it, as if the tongues of flame licking up his spine were actually burning through to scorch him, the Doctor arched away from the sensation. His head thrown back and his mouth half open in a perpetual gasp of pain, or pleasure, or perhaps just for air. His eyes were wide open beneath the twisting streams of electricity drawing a lace pattern over all, but they were not brown. Nor were they the old familiar blue, or the blazing yellow-gold which, though completely foreign, somehow Jack had expected. They were silver. The color of blindness, of milky cataracts. The one time mark of prophets and soothsayers. Those whose lack of one sense supposedly gave them the sensitivity to hear the words of the gods. To hear in birdsong and the sighing of the empty wind, the mutterings of what will be.

'The god in the machine,' Jack's mind had a chance to register with unabashed admiration and awe, before a streak of bright purple lighting arced towards him and everything went black.


	20. Chapter 19

In the ensuing silence, everyone huddled on the cold stone floor of the medical area held their breaths. When it became clear that the lighting strikes, the terrible booming thunder that accompanied them, the agonized screams of uncounted weevils, and the nearly audible thudding of their own hearts had ceased for the moment, as a one, they returned to the hub. They climbed in silence, no one wanting to speak and their footsteps echoing loudly in the concrete chamber. Sharply indrawn breaths at the extent of the carnage they saw were all that escaped them. Everything was destroyed. Every computer monitor blown out, desks overturned. The basketball backboard leaned drunkenly to one side, its post bent in the middle and its singed netting still smoking. A low moan broke the silence, as Jack pushed himself into a standing position, leaning heavily against the TARDIS' doorjamb and holding his forehead in obvious pain. As if that were some sort of cue, everyone started speaking at once:

"Did it work? Is everything going to be okay?"

"God, what's that smell?!"

"That's a stupid question. Look around you; the universe is still here in't it?"

"Dunno, ozone maybe?"

"You named your cat The Doctor?"

"My desk melted! Oh, well that's just weird!"'

"She meant about the other side; whether they managed to close their end of the rift as well."

"Yeah, what he said."

"Ugh, I think its the weevil's. They're barbequed."

"Anyone seen the pterodactyl?"

"Yeah, well, she didn't say that."

"I'll have you know he's a very intelligent cat."

Jack's laughter was enough to garner their attention. Looking back over his shoulder into the TARDIS, he addressed the still missing Time Lord. "What you think, Doc? We get the job done?"

Stepping up next to where Jack still leaned against the doorway, the Doctor peered inquisitively out at the carnage of the hub. "Well," he commented, rubbing nervously at the back of his neck. "You're going to have one hell of a clean-up job, but yeah," the Doctor smiled proudly, "Should be okay." Then swinging his eyes to take in the entire group, and lingering on one face in particular, he said, "All of us."

Jack sensed that he included the now absent voices from the other universe in his assessment. Well, if that were the case, there was no use idly standing around here. "Better get the clean-up started then," he commented, casting a baleful glance around his beloved control center. "Ianto?"

"Already on it." Jack looked up to see his friend approaching, an open garbage bag held out before him like a peace offering. Jack laughed again, loudly, feeling the sound pound through his already aching head and not caring in the slightest. He cast his gaze upon the rest of his team. Owen was already frowning at the singed paperwork on his desk. Tosh, looking pale, a smudge of dirt marring one cheek, poked despairingly at a lifeless keyboard. Gwen, watched him concernedly, until she noticed his attentions and hurriedly looked away. Martha and Donna were hanging back from it all, not sure how to act. Everyone waiting for someone to take the initiative; to make the first move. Everyone waiting for the Doctor, for the man who held time in his grasp and never, _never_ had to wait for anyone himself.

The Doctor advanced towards Rose, who stood lonely in the middle of a relatively uncluttered patch of floor. Stuffing his hands deep inside his trousers pockets and leaning slightly backwards at the waist, the Doctor adopted a relaxed drawl. "Rose Tyler," he raised his eyebrows meaningfully, "Defender of Earth."

"Pffffftt," Rose placed her hands on her hips and dropped her eyes, "Didn't turn out to be so good at that." She looked up at him through a loose tendril of hair that fell disarmingly over her eyes.

"Oh?" the Doctor asked. Straightening, he crossed his arms and said in all seriousness, "Defender of the Universe, then…of _two_ universes."

"Nah," Rose joked. She flipped the hair out from in front of her face with a toss of her head, and smiled in that cheeky way she had. "That title's taken, yeah?" Her tongue caught between her teeth at the quirked corner of her lips.

The Doctor beamed.

Then, without invitation, without the need for one, Rose was in the Doctor's arms. His arms circled about her waist and he swung her around in a joyous circle, her feet lifting off the floor with his enthusiasm. Her squeal of delighted surprise mixed with the infectious peal of the Doctor's laughter, and Donna felt unshed tears prick the corners of her eyes.

This was right. It felt right. It felt righter (was that a word?) than anything she'd felt since she first saw the Doctor's eyes burn with deadly resolve in the basement of her former workplace. Since the first time she saw the Look, and knew that someone had to stop it...had to stop him…before he did something not just he, but the entire universe, would regret.

Smiling, Donna glanced towards Ianto. He stood not too far from Jack, observing the whole scene with the impassive eyes of a stranger. Feeling her gaze upon him, he turned his head, and offered her an encouraging smile. Rose may be unknown to him, and there was no way the Doctor would ever be anything but a mystery, but in Donna he had found something he had recognized. A kindred spirit. A friend. Maybe more.

It would be an adventure, Donna thought, getting to know him better.

If any shred of hope remained to heat Martha's affections, it was destroyed in an instant. Gone in the birthday candle gleam of the Doctor's eyes, in his entirely free and easy manner. It took only a moment's observation to prove to her that every smile, every laugh, every human seeming moment she had ever shared with the Time Lord, had all been a lie. A lie the Doctor hadn't even known he was telling. She wasn't even allowed to hate him for it, it hadn't been his fault.

It was as if, before, he had existed in some strange half-life; a limbo illuminated by the light of reason, but without that more necessary light of love to fill its darker nooks and crannies. She had never known he had it in him, that light. Hell, even his alter ego in 1913 had shared the ever present gloom that Martha would have denied the Doctor felt, had she not just seen concrete proof of its being lifted.

She thought about Dr. Milligan. Tom. She'd looked him up her last time on earth. Had thought about saying something, then thought better of it. Really, how do you say, "Hey, you won't remember this, but you helped me fight off our evil alien overlords in a timeline that never actually occurred and I thought I should thank you personally." Especially to someone who can have the real guys in white coats drag you to the other wing of the hospital. And besides, sure he'd been helpful, he'd been sweet, he'd been brave, but he wasn't the Doctor. He couldn't give her the universe, the stars, the whole of time's great reach.

But then, he saved people too. Regular old blokes from earth, folks who would never even register on the Doctor's radar. People. Humans. Individuals who were just as worthy of help, of saving, as any other being out there. And in the confines of Tom's, admittedly tiny, personal universe- one planet, one country, one major city- he was a hero. And not bad looking to boot. Plus, Martha didn't know a medical doctor that didn't live or die by their morning coffee; she'd had just about all she could take of tea.

Yes, thought Martha with a wry smile, coffee might be nice way to start.

Jack smiled fondly at his two friends, a vivid memory of Glenn Miller and tentative dance steps fluttering through his consciousness. He had a feeling that after this adventure things were going to change. For himself, for his team, his friends…everyone. And not necessarily for the better. Decades of living through the human experience, and non-human as well, had taught him that the only thing that stayed constant, was change. And even when a change turned out to be, by far and large, for the good, it always sneaked in some unexpected, unfortunate side-effect. It was why people, even those who lead lives of comparative safety and ignorance, tended to fear change. It was why here, in the infancy of the twenty-first century, the human race still had to be protected from those less palatable portions of the universe. From those events that would cause them to put into question the safe little existence they had built for themselves here on this tiny blue planet. From the things that, should they become more widely known, would bring about change…which would lead to fear…which would lead to hate…which would, ah hell…Yoda did it better. Basically, humanity needed to be protected from itself. Cosseted. Buffered in wool swathes and Styrofoam packing worms, until they could understand what Jack already knew.

It's not change which is scary, but stasis.

Of course, that may just have been Jack's personal point of view. Being a fixed point of reference does tend to give one a particular perspective. But as he watched his friends twirl in blissful ignorance of the persons watching them, he couldn't help think that change had done the two of them good. Oh yes, and bad too. You couldn't argue that there had been some setbacks along the way. The Doctor, so different now in so many ways. Rose, perhaps less so at first glance, but Jack could sense in just those few minutes he had spent with her since her return, the deep rooted changes to her very soul that her recent escapades had wrought.

Still, there they were. The Doctor's eyes burning hazel into Rose's more prosaic nut-brown orbs, and neither of them conscious of the effect that each had on the other. As if nothing was any different than it had been back during the Blitz. As if time and space and alternate dimensions and the fact that there was no big band soundtrack to this very different dance didn't matter one bit. Because the one thing that hadn't changed a bit, which would never change, which would burn and grow until the stars sputtered out; that was the only thing that really counted.

Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.


	21. Epilogue

Another silly, meaningless earth saying involves the assertion that people can "fall" into love. The difficulty here is that falling implies something inevitable, something outside the conscious control of those involved. This comparison simply does not apply. There has never been a case where someone was forced into the condition of love. Forced into a relationship, perhaps, that may have resulted in amorous feelings, but never forced into the emotion itself. You can push someone off a cliff, but you can't really push them into a willing embrace with another person. I mean, the willing part sort of negates all that in the first place, doesn't it?

Will.

Humans tend to prattle on about free will, especially with regard to people using it to go against societal norms. As if that's a bad thing. As if societal norms, morals, what have you, aren't just stupid human created concepts in the first place. Really, it's a very Earth-centric view; not at all politically correct. It's the nature of time and the universe and multiple universe theory and Schrödinger kittens and, well, everything that was and everything that ever will be, to have options. Options are something you get a feeling for if you can see all the different possibilities spiralling outward in a giant, chaotic pinwheel of potentiality from every moment of existence. And options, of course, imply choices.

Look, if you've got three-quarters of an hour for lunch and you're in the middle of London, circa early twenty-first century, and you've got a tenner in your pocket and there's a fish and chips shop right across from a pub, and yeah, you like chips, but you could really go for a ploughman's, but maybe that'll take too long and you'll be late getting back to your cramped little cubicle, though you'd really rather be just about anywhere else, but you've got to make a decision fast or you'll have wasted too much time and the choice will have been made for you, which really means that you've made a choice anyways, and…oh, hang it. The point is, every moment there's a choice. Every moment, there's a distinct possibility that where your life was headed to when you dragged your sorry frame out of bed that morning is nowhere near where it's going to end up that evening when you lay down to sleep. Maybe, it's as simple as choosing chips over a ploughman's, and maybe you get run over by a reckless lorry driver on your way across the street. Choices. Possibilities. Options. Free will.

There's nothing accidental or inevitable about it. You can jump off that cliff. You can tarry too long near the edge (even though you know it's dangerous) until the darn thing collapses beneath you. You can let go the stranglehold you have on the edge because you're just too tired to hold yourself up anymore. But you don't just fall off.

Now, here's the kernel of truth.

Once you take that step, once you find yourself suspended over the great, vast, unknowable emotion that is love, there really isn't any going back. Time doesn't work that way. The universe doesn't work that way. Hell, gravity doesn't work that way, and isn't it gravity what started this whole silly comparison in the first place? You've made your choice, let yourself go, and the once just possible outcome is now as inevitable as that hard jolt at the bottom (though considerably more pleasant, or so Jack would lead one to believe). There's no falling in love, but there's no stopping it once you're engaged (in the process, not literally engaged, like with a ring and all, strange Earth custom that, as if a jumped up piece of carbon is going to make any sort of difference in the course of someone's affections). It's inexorable. Incontrovertible. One of the great, mysterious forces of the universe. So humans don't exactly have it _all_ wrong, just messed up a tad. Failing of their species.

Really, humans, they're not half bad.


End file.
